


Across a Trembling World

by lyrithim



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 2016 US Presidential Election, Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Politics, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Constructive Criticism Welcome, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Near Future, Nuclear Weapons, Presidency, bear with her, is mentioned multiple times in the passing, ish, warning: this author doesn't really know what she's talking about
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-11-26
Packaged: 2018-08-28 01:56:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8426176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyrithim/pseuds/lyrithim
Summary: Presidential / semi-Dystopia AU. It is 2021. A recently bombarded, highly traumatized United States reaches a compromise with its citizens: the government will be allowed to increase its nuclear stockpile so long as the position of the First Martyr, a citizen who will hold the key to the nuclear codes in their heart, is created.
The newly elected president James Buchanan Barnes meets volunteer Steve Rogers.





	1. The Volunteer

**Author's Note:**

> This story has been kicking around in my head since July. Since this nightmare of a presidential election is about to end soon one way or another, I figured it’s time to post at least the first chapter. I have something like 40% of the remaining two chapters written out, and everything planned out mentally, so I’ll try my best to publish everything by November 8th.
> 
> For the age difference tag: Steve is 29 and Bucky is 36.
> 
> I’m sorry to say that I’m not a huge expert on international politics, which this fanfic tries to get into. If something strikes you as inaccurate, please don’t hesitate to put it in a comment or PM me.
> 
> Note 11/25/16: The nuclear-codes-in-chest-cavity idea was first proposed by a Harvard professor. Please see the work endnotes for more information.

_To pause there would be to confirm the hopeless finality of a belief that two atomic colossi are doomed malevolently to eye each other indefinitely across a trembling world. To stop there would be to accept helplessly the probability of civilization destroyed, the annihilation of the irreplaceable heritage of mankind handed down to us from generation to generation, and the condemnation of mankind to begin all over again the age-old struggle upward from savagery towards decency, and right, and justice. Surely no sane member of the human race could discover victory in such desolation. Could anyone wish his name to be coupled by history with such human degradation and destruction?_

— “[Atoms for Peace ](http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Deterrence/Atomsforpeace.shtml),”  Dwight D. Eisenhower, December 8, 1953

 

The first time Barnes met Steve Rogers was a few weeks past his inauguration as the 47th President of the United States. Barnes’s security detail had guided him past the sea of anti-war protesters outside the gates of the reconstructed White House—an experience that bore a striking resemblance to being under siege—and into the Oval Office. In the usual whirlwind of advisers and secretaries clamoring for his attention, Barnes did not notice the short little man standing in the corner of his office until the director of the Secret Service, Peggy Carter, cleared her throat.

“I’m afraid we must have a word with our president, right at this second,” she said, and everyone else in the room left. Except, that was, a short, slim man in an ill-fitting gray suit.

“Director Carter,” Barnes acknowledged, as he leaned against his wide desk, finally allowed to take a breather. “And this is?”

“He’s the person I wanted you to meet,” Carter said, beckoning the man to come forth. “This is—”

And the words that followed out from Carter’s mouth were “Steve Rogers,” but Rogers himself said, at the same time, “the First Martyr.” Then, with a quick glance of apology toward Carter, Rogers repeated: “My name is Steve Rogers, sir. The volunteered First Martyr.”

The First Martyr was one of the provisions guaranteed in the Balanced Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2019, which Barnes himself had led while he was a junior senator from New York; it had ultimately propelled him into the presidency despite his young age. The act, or BUNWA for short, allowed for an increase in nuclear stockpiles and historical highs in military spending, supplemented by corresponding checks-and-balances to prevent accidental nuclear strikes like the one three years prior that, in its escalation, resulted in the partial destruction of downtown Manhattan. The First Martyr was one such check, written into the bill as a volunteer citizen who would hold the key to the nuclear codes in their chest cavity.

“Mr. Rogers,” Barnes said, smiling, as they exchanged a firm handshake, “it is a rare to meet such an earnest patriot as yourself.”

“Likewise, Mr. President,” Rogers replied. He pinned his lips in a tight smile, though he could not hold it for long, and his face quickly became drawn and stern.

“Hope the Pentagon didn’t give you too much trouble during the vetting process?” Barnes asked. “I know General Pierce can be onerous at times, but in person he is a pleasant man.”

“Everyone has been very accommodating,” Rogers said, softening for a moment. “It is really an honor to serve my country this way.”

“I’m glad. I will do my fullest to make your living situation in the time here as comfortable as possible.”

Again, Rogers’s expression became as muted as a senior veteran’s as he nodded with his “yessir, Mr. President.” They exchanged some more pleasantries before Rogers took his leave with a pair of Secret Service agents. As those oak doors closed—the smell of fresh varnish rolling off its shutting—Barnes turned to Carter and said, “Well, that was a charming fellow.”

“I talked to him briefly before this; he’s a good man. You’re his president, but you’re also the man who might kill him to destroy billions of people’s lives, to put it crudely,” Carter said in return, though her face was similarly worn, cast in premature wrinkles—a symptom, it seemed, of living into the third decade of the 21st century. She sat lightly in one of the armchairs. “It’s understandable.”

“True, though I do hate to see him so uncomfortable, especially around the man he would be seeing so often now.” Barnes poured himself a shot of whiskey. “He’ll be presented as, what—one of my secretaries, to the press?”

“That is the idea,” Carter said. “BUNWA forbids disclosure of the First Martyr’s identity to the public for security purposes, as you well know, but he wouldn’t pass for a Secret Service agent because of his stature. We considered making him the President’s Personal Aide, but that position is too conspicuous.”

“And terrorists wouldn’t find a secretary who never leaves the president’s side suspicious?” he said.

“We’re ready to switch him out, of course, with a substitute on six hours of notice,” Carter said. “In addition, the press is recommended to exercise prior restraint. And I think they will follow. After San Francisco was bombed, no one wanted to be the journalist who betrayed national secrets and led to the deaths of hundreds of Americans.”

“Well,” said Barnes. “Well.”

“You’re thinking that it’s censorship, Mr. President?” asked Carter.

“Yeah. Censorship with the support of 95% of the American public, but censorship still,” he said, rubbing dust off the corners of his ink pot. “I was thinking more about Mr. Rogers there, though.” He waved toward the door. “The First Martyr was written into BUNWA to gain broader support from Congress. It was just a symbolic gesture, really. Now we’re shackling some poor guy to DC’s new and improved brand of crazy, when in the end—if it really comes down to it—it probably wouldn’t matter at all.”

Carter was silent for a little while. “I think you underestimate your own humanity sometimes,” she said. “It’s a very different thing to shoot a faceless shadow in the field, than to stab out the heart of a man you’ve shaken hands with for the password to weapons of mass destruction.”

“It can be a hindrance, for when things do need to be done.”

“I’m not saying it to be one way or another,” Carter said. “But it was designed to give pause. The ultimate judgment still rests with you.”

He considered it, tasted her words, and chased them down with the rest of his whiskey. Then he offered her a wan smile, suddenly struck by the age difference between them, a difference of decades. “It is strange to think that I outrank you now, Peggy, when you’ve been my mentor for so many years.”

She laid a weathered hand on his shoulder. “Be sure to sleep early today, Mr. President,” she said, her tone soft. “It’s past midnight, and you’ll need to begin another round of talks with BRICS at five tomorrow.”

“Of course,” he said. “Thank you.”

When he was alone once again, he slid to his desk, for the tall stack of policy proposals, memos, and speeches he wanted to read over by the end of his day. The first folder, however, was a profile of Steve Rogers—Brooklyn-born and -raised as well, a former Peace Corps volunteer. Twenty-nine years old. Washington would consider both of them young, but Barnes felt ancient to remember himself at twenty-nine: only a few years out of the army, still determined that he understood the comings and goings of the world, moreso than the Baby Boomer incumbent whose seat he had stolen in the state legislature. He yearned to have the same certainty now.

Steve Rogers’s contact information was listed below his biography. Barnes fingered the page briefly before calling the cell number. It led to an automated message, which was expected—one of Carter’s underlings must still be briefing him at this time.

So, instead, Barnes left a voicemail, inviting him to lunch the day after.

—

Despite weekly meals together, the First Martyr remained less like a White House staffer and more like one of Barnes’s many sullen political rivals: fiercely, and robotically, polite. He dropped few details about his personal life, though Barnes was able to glean that he freelanced infrequently as an artist and had a boyfriend named Sam over in Virginia. Steve Rogers’s apparent interest in men did spark some curiosity in Barnes, not because of politics-related reasons but out of the same sense of kinship among members of all minority groups upon meeting another of their own.

Barnes himself was only out to a handful of people—it was 2021, and people should have more important things to worry about, but many still gathered to protest outside city halls, or district courts, or bakeries. Barnes was unlike many gay men he knew, or knew of, in that being closeted never bothered him: as a son of an alcoholic and then a member of the army himself, discretion had come easily to him from a young age. And while he had felt the burn of desire and at times approximations to love, he never had the particular need to visit those feelings upon other people.

Either way, after he was sure of Barnes’s lack of homophobia, the only times Steve Rogers was engaged in the conversation were when the two of time came about the subject of politics, which happened surprisingly seldom in the cover of all the small talk that the he and Rogers forced between them.

“—and after the meeting with those eminent Russian businessmen later today. There can’t be much discussion on environmental issues, and human rights will have to be skirted around too—”

“Of course,” Steve Rogers said, then clamped his mouth shut. It was a standard enough response, deferential enough, but the words had been bitten out too short. Rogers’s cheeks colored: he looked simultaneously embarrassed by his outburst, and annoyed by his own embarrassment.

Normally, Barnes would let these sorts of things go, but he wanted to see the man behind all this armor of courtesy. Like so many of his colleagues—who often later became accused, rightly or wrongly, of greed and corruption—Barnes had entered the field of politics out of an earnest and irrepressible desire to serve his people. He wanted to know them. He loved the glimpses of hidden depth in each individual he came across; they fueled him, confirmed his commitment to protect and promote every human life. People opened to Barnes more easily after he entered the White House and was able to shake off the image of being just another face in the corrupted hundreds on Capitol Hill, but Steve Rogers did not fall for the charms of Barnes’s position—Steve Rogers, whom he had deemed one of those zealots of justice that he spent his life and career criticizing and admiring. He wanted to know.

“No, tell me, I’m curious,” Barnes said, letting his words lie openly and frankly between them, an invitation. “I want to know what you think.”

The man peered up at him suspiciously, like a cat that had been swatted at once and had too much pride to risk repeating the same result. But it seemed that his instinct to fight overrode any of his other instincts—Barnes had a feeling that Steve Rogers was not a man used to biting his tongue—and he spoke, “I just think that some issues can be pressed more urgently in these sorts of meetings. Mr. President.”

Steve Rogers puffed up his chest slightly, with something like preemptive defiance in his eyes. It was the same look he had when he first mentioned his boyfriend. Barnes wanted to give a low whistle to show his appreciation, but he had been told by his advisers, and even Dr. Erskine, that that would be considered unpresidential, so he didn’t.

“Steve— May I call you Steve?”

Steve waved a hand in assent.

“Steve,” Barnes said, leaning forward. “Our 45th president, and his successor, left us with an international coalition that had completely splintered in the wake of what happened in the summer of 2017. Every single country in the world is still trying to climb out of the second Recession—there are economists that say we might never recover—and everyone, including our former allies, blame us.”

“Not undeservedly.”

“No,” Barnes admitted. “But all of our trade deals have been smashed into pieces, and so many of those powerhouse businesses that America was so proud of—they’ve left. Imports have fallen by 60 percent, overall growth is down by 15, and we might fall into the deflationary spiral any time soon. Two in ten Americans are unemployed; and another three in ten Americans have given up looking for work completely. We’d have an oil shortage if not for Thaddeus Ross’s great negotiations with the Canadians, but we lack virtually everything else. This is not the time to alienate every country in the world.”

“Even leaving aside the moral issues of negotiating with countries with horrible human rights records,” Steve said hotly, “you can’t guarantee anything from all this—this back-dealing—”

“My administration hasn’t been hiding anything,” Barnes said, lips quirked.

“Well, the press certainly isn’t reporting on it,” Steve said. “But what I don’t understand is—there is an arbitrariness to the way your administration is dealing with things, Mr. President. You would continue a hardline stance against China, for instance, while opening deals with Saudi Arabia. You would join Russia in international summits while expanding the US military presence along the Pacific Rim. These are not permanent alliances you are rebuilding, Mr. President, and they’d do us no good in the long run.”

“Sometimes you do what you must,” said Barnes, simply. “And sometimes you take the only things that are given to you and make as much of it as you possibly can.”

Steve’s eyes were sad. “Those words can be folded so easily into just another crutch.”

Barnes surveyed him carefully, pocketed his hands. “I’ll tell you something,” he said. He heard the thickened layers around his voice fall away—he should stop it, because it would leave him all too vulnerable, but he wouldn’t. “When I was seventeen, and failing out of every class in high school because I needed to help out at the docks—yes, they never found my transcripts for a reason—I couldn’t find a way out. My mother was,” he swallowed, “well, sick, as you and everyone else in America knows. I didn’t know I could rely on my father, who had divorced from her for ages and never came to visit. I thought he—well, that doesn’t matter. I know better, later.

“My point is, Banner was right, in that ad of his—I hadn’t joined the army out of love for this great country, or a desire to do good, to protect our people. The military service that, even I admit, my campaign liked to flaunt—that was borne of necessity. I was a kid; I needed the money. I did what I could—I left. I don’t regret the decision. I did what I must. Even after the war came, even after the Taliban got to me, it was the best decision of my life.”

Steve considered his words for some time before he recited his own story: a small Brooklyn boy, sickly but growing up in a blessed time until the financial market crash knocked the breath out of his tired mother’s lungs, left their family winded. He wanted to go to the military, fervently, but he found another way into life—there was a art scholarship for NYU, and he understood he was lucky when he took it. There would not always be such opportunities, he told Barnes, but when you were the president of the United States, there must be, and it would never do to aim lower. Barnes did not resent him for saying that.

Their debates after that were lighter, but more spirited at the same time. He came out of it with true respect for Steve Rogers—and Steve, he hoped, for him as well.

—

Chile and Brazil broke off diplomatic ties with the United States just as communications between China and the US seemed to make the barest of advances. It was the first severe blow to the new administration, and normally by now a president’s honeymoon period with the public would be over, proof again that one man was never enough to redirect to course of socioeconomic and political predestination. But the Americans were a battered people at this point, and what ridicule and humiliation they were able to take upon themselves in times of arrogant wealth they now released in the form of burnings of all products from a vaguely Latin American-sounding country and increased targets upon those who looked like “them fucking Mexicans,” though Mexico had as much a part in this as Iceland.

It was the first major crisis faced by the new President Barnes, who ordered additional police force into the cities squares of seven major metropolis to suppress the worst of riots. The nation was quelled virtually overnight, and Barnes received great praise from all corners of the political world.

—

“I’d bet that Peggy has tried to persuade you to stop swimming before,” was the first thing Steve said, amused, when Bucky finished his 200m freestyle.

“Director Carter has certainly tried,” Bucky said, panting slightly, as he pushed himself up the edge of the pool. He looked at the board, safe on dry land, and saw that Steve had advanced his queen. An interesting move. “What gives you that idea?”

“Agent Coulson has been twitching pretty badly for the past half an hour,” Steve said, low and conspiratorial, but loud enough that the man in question could hear and crack a small smile.

Bucky laughed. “Is that true, Phil?” he called out.

“We’re just hoping you’d adopt a sport that requires less perimeter work, Mr. President,” the man shouted back. “And lifeguard duty.”

“I’ve no respect around here,” Bucky told Steve. “I’d swum five miles in Iraq with a child on my back and a few codes in my pocket. I’m not about to drown in the White House.”

“Of course, Mr. President,” Steve said, because he was a little shit. He moved forward his rook. Ah. A sacrificial move. Well, that wasn’t going to work.

“Sorry again for combining our usual chess time with my swim time,” Bucky said, taking the queen with a knight.

“I understand,” Steve said easily, but his eyes were scanning the board side-to-side rapidly, trying to find an out. “I’m your secretary; I see your schedules. You have a meeting with leaders from Greenpeace, WILD, and the Sierra Club in half an hour, by the way.”

“Don’t remind me,” Bucky said in faux-despair. He shook his head. “Enough about me. Tell me—how’s Sam doing?”

Steve, who had previously dipped his fingers to pick up his bishop, paused. “He— We broke up three days ago, sir.”

“Oh,” Bucky said. “I’m sorry. What happened?”

“It’s not…” Steve did not, as expected, take the knight with his bishop. Instead, he lined the knight right by his rook. “It’s been coming for some time. We wanted it to work—we thought it would just last a couple of months. He never expected this to take more than six months—I think even Peggy is surprised that the secret hasn’t been leaked yet. But it was a pleasant break-up. He and I have both been thinking of it for some time. We actually got drinks with Dum Dum and Gabriel and a couple of other friends afterwards. Sam and I—our friendship will survive.”

Bucky clapped Steve on the back. “That’s good. A nice closure is what every relationship needs, in the end.”

Then—it was such a small gesture, really—Steve’s eyes flickered across Bucky’s naked chest, then quickly away again. Bucky’s momentary certainty of the meaning behind that straying of the eyes stunned him. Paralyzed him. And for a second longer than what was appropriate, his hand too held its place across Steve’s skinny shoulders—for the warmth there, the semblance at least of a connection deeper than flesh, yet just as shallow.

Time snapped back when Steve shifted just slightly—and Bucky wanted to yank his hand back, but he couldn’t. So he slid his hand back over the board in an attempt at normality, traveled his bishop across the board, and leaned back, putting as much space between them as possible.

“Check,” he said, light and easy.

“Give me a second,” Steve said, his eyes still on the checkered squares. It was a signal for Bucky to take a few more laps.

“Don’t take too long this time,” Bucky teased, then dived into the cool, cleansing relief of the pool.

Water blocked out sound, defied gravity, and blurred visions. Within its embrace, Bucky’s mind could set aside the weight of the sky, if only over the span of an hour each week; Atlas never had even this luxury. As he cut his way across the water surface back towards Steve, however— Everything about the physical world was vague and indistinct, but Bucky thought he could see Steve’s face tilted his way, feel his eyes following him back.

—

“You’ve become very close to Mr. Rogers,” commented Arnim Zola, the president’s chief counsel, a few weeks later. “I’ve heard that you invited him to many of your charities and private events. A staffer said you once referred to him as your best friend in or out of the White House.”

Bucky laughed. “It’s good to know your secretaries well,” he said, stacking the files on the major police departments across the nation back onto the shelf. “They can make your life very miserable if they want to. Secretaries are a pillar for any powerful organization—which I hope the US still is.”

“Mr. President,” Zola began again, wiping his glasses nervously. “If you don’t mind me interjecting—you’ve informed me of your private proclivities—”

“And I can’t imagine what the White House Counsel has to say about my sexuality,” he said, still smiling, “which I had only revealed in the case that a scandal around it truly blows up. Which also seems impossible, since I am very much the happy, single bachelor that the public knows me to be. Not to mention that CNN and Fox would surely have broken down the gates by now.”

“M-Mr. President,” Zola squeaked out again, wiping his glasses even more rapidly now. “Forgive me, but the position of the First Martyr is one of, well, martyrdom. When the NSA releases Steve Rogers from his duties and Steve’s identity becomes public—if it is revealed that there is any indecorous relationship between the two of you—it would be viewed as a violation of the Balanced Use of Nuclear Weapons Act.”

“There was never,” Bucky said, his fury slowly raising his voice, “any provision in BUNWA about whether the president has _sexual relations_ with—”

“It might not be a violation of the written codes,” said Zola, “but it would be a violation of the principles of the First Martyr.”

Bucky leveled a look at him, then leaned back into his chair. He forced his volume down. “Let’s entertain this idea, then, as anything other than horseshit. The founding idea of the First Martyr was to make it impossible for the president to shower nukes at a, to quote our beloved 45th president, ‘clear terrorist stronghold’ without further verification than a racist gut instinct. Wouldn’t sleeping with the First Martyr make it all the harder to bring a knife to his chest? Wouldn’t that be, in other words, exactly what those who _advocated_ for the First Martyr want?”

“Mr. President,” Zola said. “It is impossible to tell you how particular it is that all those attacks on your youth and inexperience failed in the campaign season. But if the truth _is_ leaked out and an impeachment charge _is_ brought against you, the rest of the American public—who have since gotten used to the taste of bombings and casual terrorist violence, and who would strongly fight for a nuclear retaliation against anyone and everyone—the rest of Americans would find you incompetent, Mr. President. You would be painted as a young hedonist instead of a young war hero. Your military judgment will come under question. People will wonder if their president has what it takes to strike back at China, or Russia, when the occasion demands it. Without a leader, your country will be thrown into the same turmoil as those first few months after August of 2017.”

“Thank you for laying things out so cleanly for me,” Bucky said. “You’ve done enough. I can take care of the rest of these files now.”

“Mr. Rogers will not be able to escape the scrutiny either, Mr. President.”

“You insulted me so eloquently, Mr. Zola,” Bucky said, “I thought you would be able to see a dismissal for what it is.”

“Mr. President,” said Zola, swallowing heavily and looking into Bucky’s eyes, “this is a matter of national security. Please tell me: have you been romantically involved with Mr. Rogers?”

“I don’t sleep with my staffers,” Bucky said. “Get out.”

—

Days before President Barnes’s first State of the Union address, a domestic extremist group gunned down the Secret Service agents accompanying the President out of a children’s hospital, taking James Buchanan Barnes himself. Ransom notes arrived at the Department of State in minutes, lunatic demands for an America in its long-gone glory restored, and the request for a couple hundred million dollars forwarded to the Treasury Department as a sidenote. Within an hour, Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment was enacted, and Vice President Abraham Erskine was declared Acting President. A nationwide search was conducted: every garrison stationed across the battered land of the United States released its men, and they raided the abandoned mine towns, the depths of forests, and the neighborhoods of average citizens. All of America lost contact with their president for ten hours.

After receiving an anonymous tip, which was in turn verified by undisclosed methods, a SWAT team of snipers assassinated ten men outside the two-story house near the coast of North Carolina. James Buchanan Barnes was retrieved, unconscious but safe, according to official reports. When the news broke, the media made for the DC hospital in which the president was resting. They crowded the outer walls, but the flashing cameras and live reports were quieter, more subdued, as if the press was having its own sort of vigil.

In two days, Press Secretary Sitwell declared that Barnes had made a full recovery. Erskine stepped down graciously as Bucky made his way to the podium, his bruised and scarring face covered with heavy make-up. In an hour-long speech, he sought to reassure his fellow Americans of his own, and thus by extension the country’s, health, and he renewed his promise to strengthen the United States until their citizens could return to a time free of fear.

—

The night following his discharge from the hospital, Bucky returned to the Oval Office. He did not dare go to his chambers to sleep—did not dare to close his eyes—because he would be so, so easily submerged back into the memories of those ten hours. He would read over his daily briefings instead, let that steady trickle of problems focus him for the days to come.

There was a knock on his door.

“It’s unlocked,” he said from behind his desk, feeling too wrung dry to open the door for his visitor, as he usually would do.

The door swung out inch by inch, revealing Steve on the other side.

“Hello,” he greeted Bucky.

“Steve,” Bucky breathed.

Because as much as this wanting he had for Steve had gnawed at him for nearly a year now, seeing him then brought back in him such a fierce and unrelenting desire to live, to be with him in this world, that he could not help but smile.

“I heard your great jerk of a boss was out for a couple of days,” Bucky said. “How’s that been?”

Steve still could not speak, but he slid the door shut behind him and stepped slowly toward Bucky’s desk.

“Bucky, I—” Steve began, then corrected himself, “Mr. President—”

“Bucky is fine,” he said quietly, “between ourselves.”

Steve stopped in his tracks, tilted his head up—he always closed himself off when he was caught off-guard, Bucky knew, it was something like a defense mechanism. Then his shoulder sagged, and he came to stand directly in front of Bucky, instead of taking a seat in the center of the room, as he usually did when they were alone.

“How’s— How’ve you been dealing?” Steve asked.

Bucky cracked a smile. “It’s not my first time under a high-stress situation.”

“Tell me,” Steve said. His tone was not quite pleading, because Bucky had never met a man with as much pride as this little five-foot-four fella, but it was the closest he had heard Steve Rogers ever come.

“I’ll be fine,” Bucky said after a long while. “It’ll—it’ll take time to get separate the now and the then, but the scars will fade, and the memories too—they’ll dull.”

Steve Rogers held eye contact with him for more than a dozen heartbeats, before he nodded, sharp, in strong reminiscence of Bucky’s first captain in the army.

“What about your family?” Steve asked. “How’s your sister?”

“My father’s worried, of course, but I’ve comforted him as well as I could. Becky’s canceling a few stops of her speaking tour to come to the White House tomorrow.”

“They must have been terrified,” Steve said, his voice cracking.

“They were,” Bucky said. He left his seat to swing by the large oak desk, sitting at the far corner, one leg hanging, so he could better face Steve, better reassure him. “But look. I’m here now.”

Steve took a deep breath in and looked skyward, blinking rapidly. “I—” He let out a shuddering sigh. “When I came back to the meeting room with Agent Dugan and saw all those bodies, and the broken glass— I recognized Hodge, and I thought, God, you were in there. I would be the one to find you dead on the ground. But I forced myself to look—Agent Dugan was calling for reinforcement in the background—and then I heard a van rush across the facility—and I looked— I didn’t know if you were in there, though I thought you were—It was that close—”

“But you memorized the plate numbers,” Bucky reminded him gently, “and the car model, and the direction. They had disabled the CCTV, and there were no surviving witnesses. It would’ve taken hours more otherwise.”

“It was too close,” Steve insisted, his voice almost a whisper. His eyes never left Bucky’s. “I’d almost missed it.”

Bucky lifted himself off the desk so he could fold Steve into his arms. Steve fisted the back of his shirt, then smoothed out his fingers.

“But you didn’t miss it,” Bucky said, though he too felt the weight of the could-have-been’s press into his chest. He held Steve tighter. “That’s all that matters.”

After a long, watery exhale, Steve patted Bucky twice on the back. They let go of each other. Steve took a seat in his usual spot as Bucky sunk into the sofa opposite.

“I notice that none of the media has been reporting anything factually accurate for the past twenty-four hours,” Steve said, now looking down at his knitted hands.

“No,” Bucky said, wearily, apologetically.

“Did the administration, or the Pentagon, ever plan on telling the public it was negotiating a weapons deal with a foreign nation? Does it now, when you were almost killed in what’s likely a state-sponsored ransoming attempt?”

“No,” Bucky said, more quietly, the word almost like admitting defeat.

Steve’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. He looked out the tall, proud windows that opened directly over an endless green lawn and endless, starry sky. Bucky wanted to look away too, but he didn’t.

“Don’t blame my generals for this,” Bucky said, as he pulled Steve’s gaze back onto him. “We needed a deal. We sought help. We underestimated our perceived weakness, but that’s because we were too proud. _I_ was too proud.”

“I wish—” Steve expelled a sigh, and he looked at Bucky in a mixture of frustration and despair. “I wish you’re right, and everything will turn out alright. I wish I know I’m right, and that you’ll listen, and the Pentagon and Congress too. I wish—” he smiled, “—I wish I can make you safe. I wish I can know that you’ll be safe, from now till the end of the line.”

“I’ll be with you, I promise,” Bucky said. “Till the end of the line.”

—

President Barnes’s State of the Union address, “A Return to Glory,” was met amidst thundering applause in the Capitol. Military recruitment increased by thirty percent almost overnight. Minor riots erupted from protests in three different cities.


	2. Capture

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve sped through this because 1) I’m extremely busy recently and wasn’t at all on schedule for anything in my life 2) tomorrow’s election day. So there are probably a bajillion mistakes in here. If you find any, please leave a comment so I can fix it. Thanks a whole bunch, and hope you enjoy this chapter. :o

“Steve, you awake?” Bucky said into his cell phone. Outside, the low thrum of the DC night slipped past the presidential limo window.

Some groggy shuffling on the other end of the line translated into static on the receiver. “Bucky? Yeah, but it’s—” a small pause, “—four thirty-four in the morning.”

“Sorry, I’ve been reading over the report on the LoC incident, and other things,” Bucky said. “And now I can’t sleep—my mind’s just too full. Usually I take a walk outside, but…”

“Yeah, I hear the thunderstorm too,” came Steve’s voice.

“Can I stay in your room for a few hours?” asked Bucky, rubbing the back of his neck. “I’ve worked in the Presidential Suite too many times. It’s too associated with work, and I need a break to clear my brain, when I get back.”

“I guess you associate my room with slacking off, then?” Steve said, all mirth. “Yes, come up. I don’t mind at all.”

It had been declared necessary that Steve lived in the White House, so Bucky had given him the Lincoln Bedroom. The decision had been met with disapproval from everyone in the know, including Director Carter, but Bucky had gone forward with it anyway. True, he could have assigned Steve to the more nameless East Room or West Room, which were certainly good enough for past presidents’ children, but since the beginning, he wanted the First Martyr to know he was appreciated, and that he was a guest to the White House of international importance equal to the Queen or any of her predecessors. Now, when Bucky met with Steve for chess or just a chat, he would catch Steve’s mesmerization at the original, handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address on the desk, and he could not imagine another person occupying this space. It was a continual blessing that the press pried less into the president’s personal affairs, these days; there would be no end to such a scandal otherwise.

“Chess?” Steve asked when he opened the door. He wore a loose T-shirt and boxers, a stark contrast to the mix of Victorian and Rococo styles of the bedchamber itself. The August before, Bucky had caught him in a full nightgown, the creases still running down the elbows, and Steve had in turn seen Bucky in nothing but his underwear; the two of them laughed. Steve had long ditched the appearance of respectability around his pyjama choices since.

“Just talk, if you don’t mind. If you’re going back to sleep, I’d just like to sit by your window and look at the storm—you know,” said Bucky. “Do nothing, for once.”

“Guess we’ll have to alert the press,” Steve said, pulling on a jacket. “Turns out the youngest president of the United States is actually a ninety-year-old man.”

Bucky nodded to the agent who had escorted him up, and who returned his nod and shut the door. “You’re not sleeping?” he asked Steve, who was now making coffee, in a square little coffee maker on an antique dresser, right below a picture of Abraham Lincoln.

“Naw,” Steve replied. “How can I, when President James Buchanan Barnes, America’s most eligible bachelor, is standing only a few feet away?”

Bucky threw a crumpled receipt—the only piece of trash he could see in the room—at Steve’s head, where it bounced off gently. “No more president jokes in the next couple of hours, or else I’ll be forced to get out some Peace Corps ones, and you know things will just get ugly from there.”

“Fine,” Steve laughed.

He accepted a cup of steaming coffee from Steve and, when Steve was settled into another chair, nodded at the easel in the corner. Its canvas was draped in yellows and purples with touches of deliberate dark swirls. “How’s your new project? I haven’t seen you do abstracts before.”

“Well,” Steve said, drumming the corner of his mug. His Brooklyn accent was thicker in fatigue—this was something Bucky noticed for himself too, but he had been quick to correct it in the early days of his political career. “There are times for everything. This day and age, with all your foundations and basic assumptions about the world messed up, anyone does anything.”

“Hm,” Bucky said, in agreement. The details of the latest Jammu-Kashmir conflict scrolled past his mind.

“It’s a side project, anyway,” Steve shrugged.

“Really? What else are you working on, then?”

“Oh,” Steve said, and a blush creeped up his neck. “Nothing important.”

Bucky was curious, but Steve then turned his clear blue eyes to Bucky. “I was wondering— You ever wonder how the world would be, if just a couple little things had changed? If—well, if we had elected a different 45th president—”

“Or a different 47th?” Bucky smiled.

Steve coughed. “I didn’t vote for you. I don’t support your party, you know,” he said, sounding embarrassed.

Bucky nodded; he had thought as much. “Banner, then. I’ve met him, talked to him alone before—he’s a good man. A giant pain in the ass, true, but in a polite, moral,  we’ll-organize-a-filibuster-the-day-before-to-bust-up-your-bill way.”

“No, not Banner. I—” and he really wasn’t meeting Bucky’s eyes, now, “—I voted third-party.”

“Really?” Bucky said, in half disbelief.

“Yeah.”

“Wow,” Bucky said, grinning. “You didn’t learn anything from the last election cycle?”

“I didn’t vote third-party then,” Steve protested. “And the major parties look a lot more different now after—well. Shut up.”

“I’m not laughing,” Bucky said, maintaining a mask of stone, “but—if I may ask—you did live in Virginia before all of this, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” he said, sounding miserable. And, when Bucky broke into an avalanche of laughter, “You know, you ought to be nicer to your constituents.”

“I agree. Especially those that had voted for me.” Steve was looking faintly mortified still, so Bucky moved on. “Yes, to answer your earlier question. I wonder constantly about the what-ifs, had I not been elected. It’s the natural place for your mind to drift to, but I try not to dwell on it.”

And at the moment, Bucky knew they were both thinking of the numerous international alliances shattered, the tanking employments numbers, the alarming rise of poverty—all of which Bucky received no blame for, in the press or from the public, because there were immigrants there to take the blame instead, and this was what nationalism and a popular leader did to the country, no matter how many times Bucky urged for calm, sense, and tolerance. The rational side of him knew that Banner had been just as popular when they were campaigning—that the press had called this the end of gridlock, the country coming together as one in These Hard Times—and surely the White House would have made Banner realize the same helplessness that Bucky was now feeling, as a leader of a debilitated nation, but Bucky did not know for sure.

“You would have stayed a senator, then?”

“Yeah—someone needed to get Banner straight on his priorities, especially for national security. But I would’ve continued to oversee BUNWA too.” He let his gaze skate over Steve’s face, before taking another sip of his coffee. “We would’ve met. Probably many times, considering how often Banner still comes to argue with me.”

Steve grinned. “I would’ve thought that you were an asshole, I think.”

“You mean you didn’t when you first met me?” Bucky raised his eyebrows as far as they would go.

“Good point,” Steve laughed. “But I would’ve come to know better, like I do now.”

“Well, thank you.” Bucky turned his cup in its saucer and set it on a side table to hide his face. “You? What are you doing after, well, after your stay here?”

“Oh,” Steve said. He sounded dazed, like he hadn’t thought of that scenario, like he and Bucky were always going to stay in this little house, until the edge of time. Sometimes Bucky felt that way too. “I, well. I’ll probably stay in Washington for a while. I’d need to pay respect to the President every time that jerk decides to do something stupid.”

“I’ll look forward to that,” Bucky said.

They settled into another length of comfortable silence—Bucky watched the soft pitter-patter of the rain sharpen, strengthen, into an outright downpour. The air had been humid for days, but tomorrow it would be clear.

Steve then asked, “That implant in my heart—how would the codes work, if you had to,” one corner of his lips quirked up, but his eyes were sad, “you know.”

Bucky pushed his back into the chair, let his fingers trail the rim of the mug. “Steve—”

“Just humor me. I know the chances are small, but— I’d just like to know.”

Bucky placed the mug to his lips and found the coffee to be at its dregs. It was cold. He set it down, leaned forward so that his elbows settled on his knees. He looked down, looked up at Steve. Steve did not flinch.

“I was thinking, it can’t just be codes,” Steve was continuing, trailing a finger down his sternum, “because things like that would’ve been hacked ages ago. But it must be a key somehow, and I couldn’t figure it out.” He waited almost expectantly.

Bucky minced his lips, sighed, and said, “It’s a—a key, yes. I can’t go into the specifics, of course, but there are various recognition softwares that they managed to build into the thing. It’s complicated, mathematically speaking, but the codes themselves have almost a, a sort of reverse resonance with a mirror software they have at command central, eigenvectors are involved, and—well. Afterwards, I give them a call.”

“And?” Steve asked.

“And? There are checks to go through, of course. To make sure I’m in command of my own senses. To make sure I’m not under any chemical influence. And—and there is no ‘and.’”

“I see,” Steve said, and he was calm. Bucky couldn’t believe he was calm. Bucky anticipated a blow to his head any minute. None came.

“I won’t blame you, you know,” Steve said, steadily. “If it comes down to that.”

“It won’t,” Bucky said.

“No, I get it,” Steve said. “I came in here with this assumption that there are these norms that no one would ever think of crossing—but that’s not true, isn’t it?” He smiled. “Martyrs live to die, don’t you know?”

Bucky swallowed heavily and found that he could not speak. At some point, Steve brought out the chessboard, and they played a quiet game until dawn broke through the rain.

—

After months of unprecedented terrorist strikes and rising paranoia, India set off a 42-kiloton nuclear bomb in the state of Rajasthan that destroyed 1,500 acres of land and an abandoned village. It was a clear violation of the 123 Agreement between India and the U.S., but it had been some years since any country in the international stage gave a damn about what America thought about anything.

Ten hours later—just before the international news media stopped celebrating, mocking, lamenting, or cautioning their audiences—Pakistan lit up their own test device along the Ras Koh Hills. Military encampments doubled along the Jammu border. A chilling sobriety draped over the entire world.

President Barnes joined other leaders of the world in his urge for calm and a dialing-down of tensions. His words seemed to fall into the void as each day, dozens more men and tanks and warheads crouched on either side of the thin line on the map.

The detente came after two months, after a concerted effort at communications by the other South Asian nations, including Afghanistan. The men and weapons of mass destruction were rolled back, and the world was able to take a small breath in—knowing, at the same time, that the pretense of peace had long been broken. Meanwhile, America stayed, suffocating, in a jar in the corner, beating her wings uselessly against the glass.

—

“Sir,” said a young redhead standing in front of him. “Agent Romanoff. Director Carter has asked me to brief you at four?”

Bucky had been drafting a speech to defend and support his Secretary of State, Kamala Khan, against allegations of sympathy with terrorists involved in his own kidnapping—of all the ridiculous things. At the voice, Bucky blinked at her from behind his reading glasses, glanced at his clock, then stood up. “Yes, Agent Natasha Romanoff,” he said, tucking away his glasses. They shared a firm handshake. “You’re from the FBI, am I correct?”

“Yes, sir,” she said, taking her seat on the other side of the desk. “Director Fury apologizes for not coming to you personally, but he is currently detained at the Pentagon, so he sent me instead.”

“His debriefings should be over in two hours,” Bucky said, chuckling slightly. “Is the matter that urgent?”

Romanoff’s placid smile stayed in place, but she did not reply to his question. Bucky felt the weight of the room shift.

“Here are the files he wished to send you,” she said, sliding a thick folder across the desk. “They should contain the usual. I’m more a—glorified errand boy, I guess I should say.”

“The usual,” said Bucky, struggling to keep his tone even. He received no “usual” files from the FBI director before this. He opened the folder. The first page was titled “A Summary of Ongoing investigations into the members of Congress Following Unusual Communications Between D.C. and Foreign Nations.”

“How free are you right now?” he said, thinking quickly. Pitching his voice low, he added, “Ms. Romanoff?”

That was ridiculous. He felt ridiculous. Romanoff looked at him like he was ridiculous, with one of her eyebrows raised. But she followed suit, saying, “Not free at all, I’m afraid,” with a significant look at walls of the Oval Office. “But—” and here her voice gained a womanish lilt, without a change in her expression, “—I can give you my number. Mr. President. We can…talk, later, when we’re more free.”

“Please do,” he said, sliding a notepad toward her. She wrote quickly. The ripped-out memo returned to him did contain a number—but also there were the words  _ We don’t know who’s listening, but someone is. Be careful _ .

“I look forward to our conversation,” he said, as the door to the office opened, “especially from a  _ lovely  _ woman like you.”

Sounds from the door ceased. Bucky glanced up to find Steve staring at the pair of them then quickly looking away.

Romanoff followed his gaze, then turned back to Bucky quickly with a quietly knowing smile. She stood from her seat. “Will five-thirty do it for you, Mr. President?”

“It’s—”

“He’s got a half-hour meeting with Senator Stern then,” Steve interrupted, his words clipped, “and a couple of other senior senators from both parties.”

“America overworks you, Mr. President,” Romanoff said, her voice coy. Her eyes, however, a sense of urgency onto Bucky. “Surely you can take some time off once in awhile, for dinner with a new  _ friend  _ perhaps.”

“The President of the United States has responsibilities—”

“Tell Stern and the others that I’ll take a rain check on the meeting,” Bucky said. “Let’s see… Tomorrow at eleven? I think there was a ten-minute break in the morning somewhere. You can always tell them to make it quick, whatever crap it is that they want to say to my face again.”

Steve’s arms were flung out so violently that he was surprised the files had not flown away as well. “ _ Buck— _ Mr. President _ ,” _ he said, as he stomped toward Bucky’s desk. Romanoff’s head snapped toward him. “Stern is chairman of the Armed Services Committee. This meeting was scheduled weeks in advance. You can’t just—”

“I’m the President,” said Bucky. “Stern and his lackeys—stop giving me that look, I know he’s from my own party—they can do with a little ego-deflating, the way they’ve been treating my memos lately. All the political foodfight around the new anti-terrorism bill lately has spoiled my appetite, and my health. Natasha here is right: I should be taking some time off.”

Bucky thought for a moment that Steve was going to engage in a full-out argument with him—which was not rare when they were alone, but hardly ever happened in the presence of other people—but Steve seemed to come to his senses and shut his mouth, staring at the carpet petulantly with a “Yessir, whatever you say sir.” 

Bucky returned his attention to Romanoff and found that she was no longer smiling, even as her face was now visible to Steve. Her expression conveyed nothing.

“Natasha,” said Bucky. She refocused on him and nodded politely. “I will see you.”

“Yes sir,” she said, bowed, and marched away. She turned back once before leaving the office—her eyes stayed on Steve with coal-fire intensity.

“Bucky—” Steve began at once.

“Steve,” Bucky said, weary all of a sudden. His joints felt like they were filled with foam, his bones hollow. He looked at Steve and wondered—entertained, for a moment—that what he saw was jealousy. It wasn’t impossible. Bucky had ego enough to campaign as the leader of a nation, and he had ego enough to know himself to be a charming man. There was also that thread between them over the past year, winding them closer and closer together until the kinship he now felt toward Steve had to be inevitable all along. But he moved away from these thoughts. The possibilities laid there led only to byzantine problems that would torture him too much and were at the same time too trivial to entertain. To be president was to sign oneself over to the service of the public, and in this lease of four years, or eight, Bucky was to be a human face to the living concepts of the Constitution, the state, and the people. There could be no room for Bucky Barnes, the individual, and no moral ground allowing him.

There were bigger things that concerned him. He fingered the stapled pages of Fury’s folder. He would need to rid all evidence of this, once he was done with it. “Steve,” he repeated. “Get me a shredder, won’t you?”

“A shredder,” Steve repeated. His expression was thunderous even as he tried to wrap his words in reasonable calmness. He could never be a politician.

“Yes. And flag a member of the service staff for me, won’t you? I’ll need them to clean up some of the clutter around here.”

“Of course,” Steve said. “And would you like a cup of coffee and a slice of cake with that too? Since I am your secretary, after all.”

“That’d actually be great,” Bucky said, skimming the second page of the dossier. It was possible too that this was all Bucky’s fancies gone wild, anyway. He had seen Steve make eyes with Director Carter’s niece just a few days ago—things would be simpler that way. Bucky was too old for him. “Thank you very much.”

He flinched slightly in his seat when the door slammed.

Mr. Johnson, an affable older man who had served the White House for decades, did come by to tidy up some of the books and loosened sheets of papers that had been tossed to the ground in anger or frustration or carelessness. He also, as Bucky instructed, shoved a few extra logs in the fireplace—all the better to burn up sensitive documents.

His coffee arrived too, much later. It came in a little china cup atop in a little gold-lined dish, set against his side of the desk as gently as a tap on a piano’s middle-G key. Bucky said his thanks but did not look up. He felt Steve’s presence linger, then leave.

—

US worker productivity reached another new low of the past decade. Unemployment rose to fifteen percent. After two dozen bombs planted at the Mall of America were uncovered before detonation, Congress granted the president powers to suspend  _ habeas corpus _ . Eighty arrests were made overnight.

—

“Bucky? Dammit, Rumlow, I know you’re screening his calls. Just let me get through to him—”

Bucky exited the voicemail. “You don’t have to do that next time, Brock,” he said. “I can speak to him.”

“Yessir,” Rumlow agreed, though Bucky thought he could feel his eyes appraise Bucky, shrewd.

—

“Why can’t Director Fury meet me personally?” Bucky said, smiling for the benefit of the reporters who were pressing their cameras against the window panes of the cafe.

“We don’t want to make it seem as though anything enormous is underway,” said Natasha, who made a show of stirring her Earl Grey, a pinky casually raised. “He’s under as much surveillance as you are, Mr. President. Even if we are to set up a meeting between the two of you, there will be alarms rung for people we least desire to warn.”

At the same time, this meeting between Bucky and Natasha, this center of a dizzying swirl of media attention, was nothing short of utmost discretion. The American people knew her as Laura Matthers, because anyone associated with a vaguely Russian name could not possibly be tolerated in the current public conscience, and Laura Matthers was the lovely, young, Princeton-educated socialite who had begun the early stages of flirtation with their lovely, young President. Their manufactured romance was the number-one subject of clickbaits for the year, as Americans rediscovered in this their national pastime of of reality shows and celebrity gossip.

Bucky considered his next words carefully. “General Pierce suggested something to me the other day.”

Natasha raised one eyebrow. “Alexander Pierce, Secretary of Defense?”

“One and the same,” Bucky said agreeably. “He wanted to know what Director Fury thought of the Justice Department’s new findings.”

She stopped stirring. “I’m not quite sure what you mean.”

“Pierce’s people recently uncovered evidence of wire transfers between Director Fury and the Lemurian Star.”

A well-known branch of Hydra, the group responsible for the failed Mall of America attack.

True to her training, Natasha did not react in any visible way. She wiped away the nonexistent cake crumbs at the edges of her lips, smiled, and said, “I think the director would be more interested in hearing what you have to say on this subject, Mr. President.”

“I think he should stop listening through whatever bug you taped beneath your blouse and give me an explanation himself, face-to-face,” Bucky said, hearing his voice rise but too tired, too tired of all of this, to stop himself, “because right now his explanations are, frankly, a whole ton of bullshit.”

“I guess we thought Director Carter’s trust in him would be guarantee enough for you.”

The mention of Peggy brought him flashes of her, delirious, in a hospital bed. Her lapse in health and psyche had come sudden and all too painful. “Don’t speak of her.”

“I see. I’m sorry.” Natasha smoothed down her dress. “I will arrange a meeting with him however I can, Mr. President. It’ll be difficult to try to fit in both of your schedules, though, especially with your East Asia tour coming up. How many hours did you meet with Secretary Pierce and other national security officials again, this week?”

“I don’t remember the exact number.” Bucky dragged a hand down his face. “Most of my waking hours,” he amended, “as is my duty.”

“Yes,” Natasha said. “Well, let’s talk about something less depressing, why don’t we? How are you and Steve?”

Bucky laughed. “‘You and Steve.’ Like we’re a married couple.”

“Aren’t you?”

Bucky shook his head and leaned back. He heard a couple dozen camera flashes go off. “Well,” he said, “if you must know, Steve also got into a fight with the CEO of Stark Industries the other day—though Tony Stark definitely did have it coming…”

—

“Can you go on, James?”

Bucky blinked wearily into the light. For a second, everything seemed to sway, but he kneaded the edges of his eyes and the shadows and double-images went away.

“Yes, General Pierce,” said Bucky, as the older man’s concerned face came to view. “Yes, my apologies, I was—I don’t know where I was.” He sank in a laugh. “Please, go on.”

“James.” The man was standing on the other side of the briefing room, far enough away to not do him any physical harm. But the tone alone seized him by the throat. “If you cannot handle this and would rather sleep, please tell me. I know it’s been a couple of hours”—twenty-five straight hours, for the third time in the past month—“but I wouldn’t be talking to you if it weren’t important.”

“No, sir,” James said, automatically. He blinked. He remembered wondering to himself before, when his head was clearer, if some of the language Pierce used was inappropriate for a man of his station. But Bucky couldn’t tell now. He couldn’t tell. He was so tired.

It didn’t matter. He trusted Pierce. Ever since Bucky came into the presidency, the people he had known pre-Inauguration had all been leaving him. He had never been too close to his family, but it was more than that: his aides, his campaign staff, and the friends he had made in his years back Stateside have all left, one by one, for various reasons. His campaign manager and personal chief of staff, both due to occupy leading roles in the presidential staff, received offers elsewhere in the private sector a month after Election Day. The father of his his top finance aide needed close care after a stroke rendered him immobile. The husband of one of his senior advisors was caught in the San Francisco attacks, and she quit, citing personal distress. The rest trickled out for one reason or the other.

He had known General Pierce briefly in Iraq, when Bucky had the privilege to meet the legend for his own valor in the battlefield. General Pierce had contacted Bucky once again when he returned to civilian life, given him an internship at the Pentagon, and endorsed Bucky in his first state legislator race. He was like a father to him.

All of a sudden, Pierce was right by his side. “James, are you feeling fine? I understand that this is not an easy job. But the fate of millions, if not billions, of people rest on you, and I want you to know that. You must do everything that is necessary to lead your country.”

The concern in Pierce’s voice shamed him. “Yes,” James said. “Yes, I’m fine. Please go on. This won’t happen again.”

“Thank you,” Pierce said, moving back to the giant map on the other side of the room that stretched from floor to ceiling. Rollins, Russo, Scudder, and sometimes even Rumlow—when it was their turn to brief James, the map of the world seemed to overwhelm them. But Pierce, standing there, seemed taller than ever, and more like a leader than James ever could be.

—

“I’ll be back in the Situation Room in ten,” Bucky said as soon as he saw Steve. “I’m just coming out to ask you to cancel all of my non-urgent appointments for the day again, maybe even for tomorrow.”

“You look horrible,” said Steve.

“Gee, thank you,” Bucky replied. He knew how he looked right now: greasy-haired, slightly unshaven, with his hair grown an inch longer than his usual clean, military-neat cut. He had not made a public appearance in days. He wondered how his public relations staff was going to deal with him when he inevitably had to have his pictures taken again.

“Why do these briefings take so long?” Steve asked. “You barely got two hours of sleep yesterday. I know this isn’t normal. I’ve spoken with your Chief of Staff, and she agrees too.”

“Just how things are run around here,” Bucky said, with some irritation, as he tipped back the dregs of his morning coffee and reviewed lines from yesterday's meeting notes. 

“There’ll be a children’s choir performing in the East Room at three,” said Steve. “They’re from your old elementary school. At least go to that.”

“You know I’ve rescheduled my meeting with the cabinet to that timeslot,” Bucky said, slamming the binder close. “I’m sorry, but those children will just have to learn disappointment in life early.”

“Something’s off about you,” Steve said. Bucky looked at him. “You haven’t had more than a head-nod of a sleep in the past month and half. This is unreasonable of them, Bucky—it should be even more important for you, of all people, to have a clear head.”

“Jesus Christ,” laughed Bucky. “Why don’t you leave being the president to me for once, Rogers?”

It was the wrong thing to say, but he did not wait for a response as he stalked out of the room.


	3. Conviction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Halfway through his third year in office, President James Buchanan Barnes embarked on one of the most important diplomatic mission in America’s young, flickering existence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m writing most of this chapter after November 8th, but the very first section was written before 6pm EST on the American election day and was the story’s background from the very beginning of its conception. The outcome of the 2016 election, heavily referenced here, was unknown to me at the time. Given the current political climate of America, this specific chapter of the story may be too bleak, but I chose to publish it because the message I wanted to get across in this story is still pertinent. And, let’s be real, it’s just a fanfic.
> 
> Also, I lied. The next chapter is going to be the last. I’ve finished the main story (there is only ~2k left of it after this chapter), and there’s a monster of an epilogue that’s going to follow (part of the same chapter) that should also be finished pretty quickly because it’s been outlined to death.
> 
> Hope y’all enjoy.
> 
> **Warnings:** 2016 election references. Ableist language (see endnote for details).

On August 19, 2017, the 45th President of the United States rode through the chain of commands and ordered the open-fire of 100-kiloton nuclear missiles on four separate cities of a sovereign nation, unprovoked. Later recordings showed that the President believed himself to have received “good information” that the nation was a “clear terrorist stronghold”—since then unilaterally proven untrue in international investigations—and used his executive powers to that effect. The retaliatory, non-nuclear strikes that followed ripped open downtown Manhattan, which had never recovered since. One-hundred thousand lives were lost in the exchange.

The President’s orders were widely viewed as an act of insanity, and he was assassinated by a Secret Service agent within the hour, before the agent himself committed suicide. So the world avoided nuclear war.

His vice president stepped up to the highest office of the land the next day and failed, among other things, to stop the collapse of his own party, to stop the mass emigration of Americans out of the country, and to stop the implosion of U.S. foreign relations. The confusion of trade deals, nuclear deals, and alliance realignments that followed saw the world plunge into a second recession. It lasted six months globally, but for the US, it was six years and counting.

In those six years, the very terrorists that the 45th president had targeted infiltrated the country, and the results were monthly small-scale, small-town strikes that wouldn’t even make the front page of a paper anymore, culminating in the third biggest attack on US soil, in San Francisco, December 2020. All the while, reports of hate crime tripled across the fifty states, and whispers of secession and civil war grew louder. The media grew quieter.

From the dust, then, shook out the Balanced Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2019, one Bucky Barnes, and one Steve Rogers.

—

When Steve entered the room, Peggy Carter was drifting off in her bed by the sky-stretching window—the blue outside was endless and vast. The nurse stepped forward, as if to wake her, but Steve stopped him. He had the entire day off. There was time enough to wait.

He had a sketchbook with him, always, but his hands were still while he sat. Atop the dresser closest to Director Carter’s bed were pictures of her children and grandchildren and other members of her extended family and friends, crowding towards her—Steve saw the picture of a much younger Sharon Carter, Peggy’s favorite niece. The glass reflected unevenly in the pale light, smudged, well-worn. They carried with them the evidence of a full and lovely life.

A jet snarled overhead, pressing tremors into the walls and floor. Steve started, though it must have been flying miles away, and jets were nothing but common these days.

“Part of living in D.C.,” Peggy broke in. He swiveled back to find her staring at him, a soft, sad smile on her face. “Good thing, though. Wakes an old woman up from her unnecessarily long naps.”

“How are you feeling right now?” he said, coming to sit by her bedside.

“Oh, splendid enough,” she said, moving herself to a fractionally more upright position. Still recovering, perhaps, from her last surgery. Steve tried to help her, but she batted his hands away, as usual. “I remember you, Steve.”

He was glad. They hadn’t known each other long at all, in the grand scheme of Peggy Carter’s life, and it was a coin’s toss chance whether Peggy recognized him or thought he was just a polite young man Bucky liked to bring along. But when she was present enough, Steve still felt that ancient affinity he had for her from the day they first met—when she had laid a hand on his shoulder and told him, “Be proud that you are here. Now the President not only has the First Martyr, but also a good man by his side.” They had met with each other biweekly for need-to-know national security briefings, but sometime along the way she became his mentor on the ways of D.C., then his first friend since moving into the city.

“I brought you some of those strawberries from the Dupont Circle market,” he said, slipping a box out from the brown paper bag. She smiled her thanks but asked him to place it on a nearby table—her appetite wasn’t as it had been, he knew. “Sharon also asked me to give you this before I left,” he said, handing her an envelope.

“Thank you,” she said, tugging out the letter. “She’s at—Cuba, was it now?”

“Yes,” he said. “Managing half of America’s foreign affairs on her own, as usual.”

“Well, tell her she still hasn’t beaten her old auntie yet until she’s socked a world leader in the face,” she said as she skimmed through the letter.

“She might someday, with Bucky,” said Steve, the joke out before he could stop it. Then he clamped his mouth shut, but Peggy noticed it anyway.

“He couldn’t make it again, I presume?” she asked, calm.

“No,” he admitted. What he didn’t tell her was that a member of the President’s personal security team, Brock Rumlow, had swung by his desk one day a couple of months back to book out all the times Bucky usually reserved for visiting Peggy, to the purpose of “strategic international legal affairs briefings” with the White House counsel.

“The President’s a busy man, Steve,” she said. “I understand.”

“No, it’s not that. He’d never— It’s—” He drew in a sharp breath. He still met with Sam and his other friends from Virginia every once in a while for a beer or brief hiking trips, but he had so few friends who could know what he knew. He needed Peggy.

“Peggy, they’re working him to the bone,” he finally said. “And I know being the President is one of the toughest responsibilities in the world out there, but— This is different. It’s so much worse than the last time I told you, he’s come back all sweating and gray and shaking all over. I’ve seen nervous breakdowns, and overwork, in Peace Corps, but this is Bucky. He’s the face of the American people—this can’t happen to him. It shouldn’t be happening to him. I know he gets less than four hours of sleep a day, and eats a meal, or less, if he’s lucky. Something’s wrong, something’s going on in those rooms of theirs in the Pentagon. I’ve tried to talk to everyone from the head chef at the White House kitchens to the Vice President’s chief of staff, even the Secretary of Defense, once—but they all look at me like I’m nuts for showing concern for the President. The only one who seems to give a damn is Laura Matthers, but she’s—she can’t help him. Peggy,” he said, his throat swelling up as his eyes began to sting terribly. She wrapped a cool hand over his own, and he regained some control of himself. “Peggy. He wouldn’t even look at me—I don’t know how to help him.”

“Oh lord,” Peggy was saying.

“There are all these arrests made, over the country, under the President’s name. Conspiracies, they call them—even when everyone knows they’re just college kids, protesting, angry, the only way they know how—they don’t deserve the noose. This ain’t him, Peggy, it ain’t. He looked barely able to lift himself up, ready to collapse, any moment. God, Peggy, what are they doing to him? What’s happening if he collapses and no one’s there to help him?”

“He’ll have us,” she said firmly, and Steve was briefly amazed by her trust in him, where everyone else had swatted his pleas away. But he should have known. This was Peggy he was talking to. “He has you. You’re right—this isn’t the natural operations of the White House. When I’m—clear-headed, I’ll pull whatever strings I still have, in this great swamp of ours. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

“Thank you,” he breathed.

“Oh, don’t thank me,” she said, dismissively. “That kid has been nothing but trouble since the day I found him wandering into Capitol Hill. You ought to give him a hard right hook once he comes around again. Beat my niece to it.”

He turned around to blink off some of the tears. “Yeah,” he chuckled. “Yeah, that I’ll do.”

“Good,” she said. Her expression turned somber. “I don’t like the sound of this. I haven’t had my finger on the pulse of D.C. in a while; I can’t see what’s ahead. You must be careful, Steve.”

“I will,” he promised.

She nodded. Then, contemplatively, Peggy asked, “This Laura Matthers, I’ve seen her on the news before. A girl of Bucky’s?”

“Yeah,” Steve said.

“I think I might know her,” Peggy said. “At least, someone who does. I’ll see what I can do.”

—

Halfway through his third year in office, President James Buchanan Barnes embarked on one of the most important diplomatic mission in America’s young, flickering existence.

The only US president to pay official visit to the island of Taiwan was Dwight D. Eisenhower, during the height of the Cold War. The Korean War had just ended, so the former President sought political reaffirmation, and a potential naval base, in the newly minted island nation that sat next to the People’s Republic of China. It was not so different, upon reflection, from what America was seeking now.

The signing of the newly negotiated trans-Pacific military treaty had been in planning ever since Bucky ascended into the presidency, but the location of official meeting had only been recently decided, after a suggestion from Defense Secretary Alexander Pierce. Both Bucky and his Secretary of State had initially found the idea unnecessarily provocative toward China, especially since the new treaty would deliberately exclude the nation. But in a few days Bucky was convinced, and Kamala would later manage to turn around the other members of the signatories-to-be, to international surprise.

The media was in a frenzy, calling this the greatest diplomatic event since the Paris Peace Conference. White House news conferences would end in passerby-turned-crowds shouting “U—S—A! U—S—A!” in the background, garbling all of Press Secretary Sitwell’s best soundbites. Japanese and Korean flags were in fashion and appeared on every item of clothing. Somewhat racist Asian impersonations would become viral every once in awhile, to let those in and occupied with the elite media tut at the ignorance of these ordinary people.

But President Barnes himself played coy with the cameras, and fresh photos of him rarely appeared in the week after the completion of the trans-Pacific treaty. Just before he would depart the country, the American people saw his face at last, livestreamed across six dozen different platforms in a little podium next to Air Force One. He was surrounded by an intimidating set of Secret Service agents as well as the Secretary of Defense with his glittering medals. If the trembling in his voice was left unremarked, if the carefully set camera angles could not quite conceal the heavy bags under his eyes, or his unnatural pallor, or the white streaks down his hair—well, there were more important things for the American people to focus on, anyway.

—

The air here was heavy, Bucky thought, as a deluge of reporters flooded the tarmac. Yet, endlessly deep—deep enough to dive in and sleep, forever, in its depths.

An arm blocked his path. Rumlow’s arm. Bucky stopped. He gestured to the right. Bucky was well-trained, and he followed that instruction with no stumbling, or slipping, or any other loss in composure—for composure, as Pierce had drilled into him, was the most important facet of the American presidency. “You wouldn’t want a repeat of the 45th, won’t you, James? You wouldn’t want to lose face for the nation,” Pierce had asked him. And no. He did not.

A amicable woman was shaking hands with him. The Taiwanese president. On cue, as he practiced, he rolled out a string of simple, but well-oiled Mandarin. The welcome crew around them broke into excited chatter.  That was one for YouTube clips and memes—gotta keep up America’s good name. As the dignitaries talked, his translator returned rolls of sentences in English, a language he should understand, but couldn’t, and the words slipped out of his grasp like an eel. He was missing out on a lot these days.

He thought he saw Steve, for a moment. Steve should be here, somewhere.

Then he was being pushed into a limo as he smiled and waved graciously, smiled and waved. Then he was flying, it seemed, across a winding highway, chasing the roiling green of these foreign hills and their thick, unyielding forests—the sky overhead was gray, weighing down on him. Deep, as before.

Then he was on a podium outside a tall, handsome museum, delivering a speech he had memorized but did not remember. Zola had written it for him.

Then he was swung from the Japanese Foreign Minister to the Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister to the Singaporean Defense Minister in dizzying beat. Everything was natural to him, these conversations, these handshakes, these little pleasantries. He was doing his country good.

Then he was shoved back into his limo, and within the blink of an eye he was in a grand hotel— _the_ Grand Hotel, the Yuanshan Hotel. The space of the lobby was open and empty, and the people were like bats, upright bats, in an echoing cave, and he felt the sudden urge to scream and wait for the scream to boomerang back and knock him to the floor, but he didn’t. The ceiling was held up by thick red pillars, and now he felt like a pinball, energy compressed, bouncing among these pillars in absurd speed—everything else moved too fast—and trying to _stay afloat, stay afloat_ until— He was shown into a lavish room by a man with slicked-back hair weaving poetry about the hotel’s history, but all he could focus on was the pimply hotel boy around the bend of the grand staircase, trying to drag a suitcase up another flight of stairs, and his coworkers’ nervous chitters. It was a quietly comedic scene, and he turned around to catch Steve’s eyes, but he caught himself instead.

Dragons were carved into the banister—carved out of it, as though they were trying to escape.

Rumlow disappeared at some point, and now he was alone in a room bigger than the Oval Office with a single, giant bed, enough to fit two families, if he even had one.

But he had been well-trained, so he opened a laptop and spent the next half an hour carefully answering emails and brushing up on his schedule.

But the temptation of the bed was too great, and he felt himself stumbling towards it, lowering himself gingerly into it, and slept, back straight, with his arms crossed over his chest.

Rumlow found him like this, twenty minutes later, and threw him bodily against the wall. He woke with a gasp, while Rumlow dashed out the contents of a vase over his head. As he spluttered and coughed, Rumlow informed him that his usual retinue of tailors and makeup artists would be here soon, to doll him up for the celebratory dinner later; Pierce would attend the private delegation meeting happening later that afternoon, so he needn’t worry about that.

James thanked him and got to work.

—

The celebratory dinner was livestreamed in the United States and remained the number-one trending topic across every social media platform and search engines in its duration. Americans gathered in bars and open-air theaters to watch the event, next to a beer or a picnic. There was an air of athletic competitiveness in all of this: each foreign minister’s speech was occasion for cheers, and the aggregate decibels, if measured, would correspond directly with the level of diplomatic friendliness the country had towards the U.S. The people were especially fond of Japan.

But of course, their attentions were most focused on their president. Tall, strikingly handsome, with movie-star eyes and movie-star smiles, President Barnes never looked more fitting in his position and was never more the subject of the Americans’ romantic fantasies than when he stepped to the lectern and spoke, flutteringly, of strength and peace. There was a haunted look in his eyes, and his people could see that the stress of the job was weighing down on him, but he forged on ahead with a dignity men like him tended to have, in face of insurmountable odds and their nation under siege. The Americans were never prouder.

The broadcasting network tried to spread out their coverage to each individual world leader present at the dinner, but even they seem to find President Barnes’s figure irresistible, and the lenses trailed after him as he, charmingly, chatted with the most important members of the delegation. Did their eyes seem to skim over his face while they chatted? Did their mouths seem to twist up with just a touch of sardonicism? If so, the Americans did not notice, and they dreamed on of American greatness.

A few watching noticed a peculiar figure among the crowd. He too was clearly American, his hair dusted dirty blond. There was nothing striking about his stature, for he was small—it was his movements that would stay those observers’ attention, scampering among the crowds, walking clearly against the swelling and falling tides of the room. Looking for something. Reaching for something. He appeared in conjunction with their dear President surprisingly frequently, but always in the background, looking forward. At times, though, one could almost swear that their President, too, was looking back.

When the first explosions hit the Taiwanese capital of Taipei, the livestreams remained on. Everyone in the nation, and everyone in the world soon after, saw the shock then horror in the world leaders’ eyes. Then the second explosion hit, bursting a window wide open and throwing glass shards into the air like confetti. The screams began, and the screens went black.

—

The President was escorted out the scene in expert speed, and he could not fight his bodyguards off, weak-limbed as he always was now. The adrenaline wore off as soon as one of the men told him that the First Martyr was moved to a secure location, and he was back to drifting in and out of consciousness, seeing only flashes of the world around him, the sounds of it all distorted and over-amplified and incomprehensible.

Abruptly, he was dropped into the back of a van. At least ten different monitors stared back at him, with Alexander Pierce sitting primly in the center.

It took him a few seconds to register what the monitors were showing.

Pierce gestured him to take a seat. He did. The doors behind him slammed shut. The van rumbled and moved forward.

He closed his eyes and, a seeming century later, opened them.

CHINA ORDERS NUCLEAR STRIKES ON D.C., CITY IN PANIC

Then:

OVER 500,000 RESIDENTS TRAPPED IN CITY AS TRAFFIC BLOCKS HIGHWAYS

D.C. RESIDENTS FLOOD SOCIAL MEDIA WITH GOODBYE MESSAGES; ERSKINE, BANNER, OTHER TOP OFFICIALS MAKE FAREWELL ADDRESSES

OFFICIALS “CANNOT STOP MISSILES’ TRAJECTORY”

NO RESPONSE FROM TOP US COMMAND

There was a countdown clock, the most morbid feature of the entire display, and just as he made sense of it all the clock struck zero and all of the feeds fizzled out at once, with only the news ticker running sentences with empty across the bottom of the screens. A few of the words jumped out to him: CASUALTY, UNKNOWN, SAVED, CATASTROPHIC, HORROR. Then, all of a sudden, there were the images of mushroom clouds and rippling lands, and the words RETALIATION, RETALIATION, RETALIATION splintering the text.

James threw up what little he had in his stomach on the floor of the van. After he was done retching, Pierce spoke.

“It’s time.” Pierce seemed to loom ever the larger than the kind, affable mentor he had met all those years ago. “The leader of the free world must act now.”

James looked at him with blank despair.

“Your presidency has been a gift to our nation,” Pierce continued, gentler than James ever remembered him being. “You’ve advanced our progress more than you ever know, but we need you to do one last thing.”

Suddenly Bucky’s sluggish mind understood. He felt his eyes well with tears as he lost control and started sobbing. “I can’t,” he pleaded. “Please. It’s Steve.”

Pierce’s eyes hardened, and Bucky was afraid. “America as we know it is at a tipping point between survival and annihilation,” he continued, firm now. “Thousands of lives have already been lost, and there are thousands more to come. If you don’t do your part, the nation will burn.”

“No,” he was mumbling out now. “Please, no, it’s—”

Pierce backhanded him, hard, across the left cheek.

Bucky withdrew into himself.

“What do you live for?” Pierce asked, his tone even.

“To serve my nation.”

Silence. “Do you know what you have to do, then?”

“Yes,” he said. The tears had stopped.

Pierce regarded him, then retrieved two items from the folds of his coat: a long, thin surgical knife and a little square packet. He folded James’s hand over the knife and lifted the packet to eye level.

“He’ll go quietly,” Pierce reassured. “Painlessly. Knowing that he saved his nation. He’s a patriot like you. You know that. He would’ve wanted this.”

James could not manage any reaction. He stared straight ahead as Pierce tucked it into his tuxedo’s front pocket.

“We’ve estimated that you have an hour, James, before the Chinese can fire their next strikes,” Pierce said. “We’ll make sure no one interrupts you during this time. We trust you.”

—

The first boy he had ever loved was named William, two years older in high school, all curly hair and bright smiles that trapped Bucky’s wandering eyes when Bucky dropped off lunches in front of their steps. Whenever he accepted Bucky’s delivery, he teased, “Didn’t have to climb the fence this time, white boy?” because that was what Bucky did, the first day on the job, when he couldn’t figure out how to use the hatch and fell over the edge, on his face, right in front of William. Then the boy would say, “Thank you, my ma will appreciate this.” And Bucky would nod and leave. That was the extent of their interactions, but Bucky never failed to look to Delivery Wednesday, until one day William, with that same smile, told him they were moving away, him and his mother both, and Bucky felt his young heart break quietly.

By twenty-two he had seen a few queers beaten up in the high school he left behind, heard more than a few slurs in the army, and knew not to fall in love with men—and didn’t, for a while, until he caught a fellow private watching him, and he met his eyes. Darrel was his name, from a small town thirty miles out of Atlanta, a quieter soldier who could nonetheless nail down any man’s ego with a single sentence, as he did in many of the rowdier conversations in the squad. So following a patrol one night, he and Bucky got roaringly drunk with the rest of the platoon, and together the two of them staggered to the back of the pub, where they fucked. Six months of furtive fooling-around followed, during which Bucky’s head was filled with all sorts of silly ideas about Darrel leaving his girl in Missouri and the two of them moving to Massachusetts after their tours. He hadn’t noticed how Darrel disengaged himself, slowly but surely, until one day Darrel simply disappeared and a lieutenant came in to explain that Darrel’s request for a transfer had just been approved, that someone new would come and replace him soon.

Bucky strayed, again, at age twenty-eight. By then he was a up-and-rising star in the New York State Assembly and several years since swearing off casual encounters with men. This time it was Carlos, a representative—lobbyist—from the taxi drivers union. Carlos, who more often than not managed to charm his way into Bucky’s office, even when Bucky would give all of his interns on their orientation days a mug shot of the man with the words DO NOT LET HIM IN captioned below. The man was infuriatingly good at his job, and infuriatingly good at annoying Bucky, and soon, without Bucky grasping all the nuances in time, Carlos charmed his way to a dinner, a movie, and Bucky’s bed. It was 2013. The _Windsor_ decision had just passed, California’s Prop. 8 just struck down. Same-sex marriage was legal in New York, and he worked with openly gay legislators in the office over. But when, a year later, Carlos told Bucky to go public with the relationship, or lose him, Bucky eyed the upcoming special election for a US Senate seat and hesitated. He wanted to do more for the world, and the state legislature was not the place where it would happen. Carlos, whose spirit had always been too free for him, understood, and left.

Bucky never told any of them he loved them. He never realized it in time.

He was elected as the second senator from New York in 2015. The rest was history.

—

It had been too long since they stood this closely to each other.

Something expanded painfully in his chest, clawing into his veins and the ends of his nerves. He told himself he couldn’t feel it.

“Bucky—” the other man began.

He said nothing, crossing the spacious room—almost too spacious for an underground bunker—for the coffee table on the other side. There were cabinets here, piled high with canned food and water, and more. He spotted a bottle of whiskey and reached down, but the change in elevation forced blood to swish unevenly in his skull. He choked back another wave of rising bile and gripped the edge of the cabinet until the ground beneath his feet was steady again.

“Bucky,” the First Martyr repeated, more alarmed now.

“It’s fine,” he said. “We just need to stay here for a while.”

“What do you mean, everything’s—” Steve took a long breath in, his thin chest heaving. “Bucky, please tell me what’s going on.”

“Of course,” he said, bloodlessly. He turned around and held up an evenly poured cup of whiskey. “Before that, why don’t we have a drink first?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ableist language (from Warning): The 45th president’s order to bomb a foreign country unprovoked is rationalized as his having a mental illness.


	4. Resolve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The First Martyr was not running. Of course. Steve never ran.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve added “Canon-Typical Violence” to the tags because of this chapter. The epilogue is skippable.

The First Martyr was still glaring, still testy, as he extended his hand, accepting the tumbler.

The crystal glass weighed too heavily between James’s fingers, straining his wrist. He thought—

_ Steve’s pale sliver of a body lying prone on the floor, and all of that red, drained out an open gash across his chest, like the mangled corpses he’d seen after the IED blew apart half his squad— _

The glass fell to the floor, shattered. It soaked into the ancient wooden floors, and with it the all of the coarse white powder in the little paper packet long dissolved. Steve glanced down, then glanced back up. James did not understand why at first. Then. His hands. His own hands. They were shaking as though electrocuted.

Steve’s slim arms drew up, reached for him, but James crashed into the cabinet behind as he backed away. There were words formed on Steve’s lips. They tried to reach for him, too.

“...need to talk about this first. What’s been happening with you? I’ve asked—”

Something beeped. For a second, he thought it was an explosive. But from his pockets Steve pulled out a flip phone, the cheap kind, not Steve’s regular one. Then his wrist slackened, in shock, and the message was visible.

FROM: N  
ITS PIERCE. HES TURNING JAMES. YOU HAVE TO RUN.

There were sounds of fighting outside the safe room. Shouts and blood-curdling screams. At least, James thought there were. Like all noises in the background, they wobbled forth and seemed to burst by his ears, too slow, too deafening. Were those foreign soldiers, attacking his men? Pierce had promised that the room would be well hidden even from others in the bunker. James hoped so. Either way. He needed to hurry.

_ America as we know it is at a tipping point between survival and annihilation. _

Dr. Erskine was dead. Peggy too, most likely. God, up to seven hundred thousand people possibly. And then the fallout.

God, they were coming for his family next. All of them.

But now he was going to do the same to Steve too.

The First Martyr was not running.

Of course. Steve never ran.

An explosion shook them both, rattling loose chunks of plaster from the ceiling. Steve stood and stared at him. Only he could stare down his murderer.

He wanted to say,  _ I have to _ , but there could be no more speech from himself, now. Anything from his lips would be vile for what he was about to do.

He took a step forward. The ground quaked, but he could not tell now whether it was a physical quake, or if his senses were failing him again.

“What did Pierce tell you?” came the question.

That defiance. Always that stupid defiance. He had always thought it would be the death of Steve.

_ Thousands of lives have already been lost, and there are thousands more to come. _

“Whatever he told you, whatever he’s shown you, he’s lying,” Steve was saying.

James grabbed ahold of the other man’s lapels and shoved him against the corner of the room. He had meant to exert enough force to knock the First Martyr out, but he didn’t. Steve choked out long, labored breaths all the same, but he didn’t stop talking.

“You know—you know I would die for my country, happily,” Steve wheezed. “But this isn’t it. This is not the time—”

Then he slammed his knee right into James’s vulnerable stomach.

This was followed by a mean right hook that knocked James down and left him sprawled against the wall.  _ It’s not easy for someone like me, _ Steve’s voice reminded him, from long ago, _ growing up with those lean, starving boys back home— _ Be quiet. Be quiet.

The First Martyr was standing. Just standing, though his fingers were a furious blur of motion across the keypad of his phone. James charged for him, slamming him against the other side of the room, nailing him in place with an arm across his thin shoulders. His phone was crushed beneath their feet. The other man shouted out more questions, more demands, and James couldn’t bear to listen. He covered Steve’s mouth, tried to squeeze the breath out of him, the way he had learned in the army—because then it wouldn’t hurt, anymore, for him. Unconsciousness wouldn’t hurt.

But Steve bit his palm and knocked their heads together, and stars drifted across his vision. They fell to the floor, together, and wrestled for a bit more before James regained the upperhand and pinned down the other man’s legs with his thighs and squeezed his fingers around Steve’s throat.

“Bucky—” Gasp. Fingers scrabbling against his arm. “Buck, Bucky—” Steve’s evening suit splayed out around him, ripping at the seams and badly crumpled. “Listen to me.” He felt warm, even in the chill of the night. “P-Pierce is lying.” He couldn’t be. James had seen it all for himself. “Listen,” Steve pleaded. His ribcage heaved against the press of James’s arms. His hips bucked upward, trying, fruitlessly, to throw him off. “Trust—trust me, please.”

_ If you don’t do your part, the nation will burn. _

“I have to do this,” the words were out, before James could stop himself. “I’m sorry.”

And the man beneath his hands ceased to struggle.

Shaky fingers came up to his cheek and stroked the skin beneath his eyes, tracking the path of tears James hadn’t known he was shedding.

“I,” Steve croaked out. Beneath his hand, James felt him swallow. “It’s okay, Buck. I forgive you. Do what you have to.”

Steve cupped the back of James’s neck. Gently. Holding on.

It was impossible. It was impossible to disentangle the First Martyr from Steve. It had been foolish of him to even try.

Not even hard enough to bruise, James realized, as he loosened his fingers from Steve’s neck. Not even hard enough to quiet that loudmouth any. The world had been doomed from the very day Steve Rogers had walked into the White House.

He searched now for the scalpel pressed against the outer seams of his trousers. When the silver caught a loose strand of light and flashed into the ground between them, Steve flinched. And that alone made Bucky want to cut his own guts out. Then Steve saw the direction the blade was pointed—toward Bucky himself—and he understood. His eyes commanded Bucky to remain still as he folded his fingers around Bucky’s, unfurling them the same way Pierce had pressed the blade into his palm. Then the scalpel was thrown across the room, to a point Bucky’s field of vision did not reach.

He moved to stand then, Bucky did. But Steve tugged him down lightly by the tie and kissed him.

It was a cliché, the idea of empires fallen to the lust of their leaders. It was written into the narrative of the Tang Dynasty’s decline after the excessive beauty of Yang Guifei, the death of Anthony in his obeisance to sensuous Cleopatra, and the mythical Paris and his Helen of Troy. For so long in his life Bucky had thought himself incapable of any more romantic feeling, and it was almost laughable to him now that for this—his desire for another man—he would let the rest of the world burn and stand back and watch. But Steve wasn’t just any other man.

The room was quiet now. The commotion outside had ceased, and it occurred to Bucky that perhaps he had imagined all of that, all of this, everything and anything that was going on in the span of the last hour, day, week, decade. He was so tired. But Steve tilted Bucky’s head just so, changed the angle of the kiss, and Bucky thought he had not the imagination to ever think of this, delirium or not. Steve was stroking the side of his face, catching again the tears at the corner of Bucky’s eyes. Bucky broke away, rasping out an apology that Steve shushed away.

He burrowed his face in Steve’s chest, his nose pressed against the buttons of Steve’s shirt. He felt Steve’s heartbeat. His own lips continued the litany of apologies until he was hoarse with it.

They held each other like this for an indeterminable amount of time, waiting for the end of the world, until at some point unconsciousness drew Bucky in and tucked him gently within its embrace.

—

When their door was knocked down, hours later, it was to a wave of S.E.A.L. operatives and men dressed in the camouflages of the Taiwanese special forces. Once they saw Steve standing shakily in front of the President of the United States, his chosen weapon of a whiskey glass shard clutched between trembling fingers, they lowered their guns.

Steve, wild and burning with fatigue, refused to budge still when one of the officers moved forward to collect Bucky. From behind the frontlines, then, emerged Laura Matthers—Natasha, Steve had to remind himself. Natasha Romanoff. She ordered the man down and slung Bucky’s arms around both of their shoulders. They marched out of the compound like this, the armed men around them warily watching their every step.

It was during this time that Natasha explained the faint bloodstains across her cheeks, the thin cuts around her cuffs and shorn batches of hair. Steve was only able to grasp a couple of her points, so much of it like something out of a Hollywood blockbuster: an international conspiracy perpetuated by the terrorist group Hydra, ensnaring the likes of the U.S. Secretary of Defense and the Chief Counsel. Then, a frantic search for the President leading to a covert military operation into the depths of Hydra’s base. Then, finally, the recovery of the President himself.

“Pierce had him believe D.C. was destroyed,” Natasha said, of the footage they uncovered in the President’s getaway van. “He made him think World War III was the rational, preferable option.”

And Steve thought, with the warm weight of Bucky’s side pressed against his: Oh.

“But you’re alive,” she said. And he didn’t know her well enough then, having only worked with her outside of her cover for a couple of weeks—they hadn’t grown to like each other yet, to respect each other fully. Even so, he could read the conflict in her voice. Gratefulness, for the catastrophe that had been averted. Caution, too, because Steve Rogers had suddenly become a much more powerful man than she had ever realized.

Having survived now three and a half years of Washington, Steve knew he should be more alert to the fact that a top federal government spy agent now thought him a dangerous man. But the world was whole. Bucky was alive. Steve, overwhelmed by his love for him, couldn’t give a damn about anything else.

Later, in the backseat of a secured car, at the center of a motorcade provided by the Taiwanese president, Bucky opened his eyes—unused, Steve thought, to being allowed more than a few hours of sleep a day. But Bucky reached now for Steve’s hands and tangled their fingers together, and the sun broke above the horizon to lighten the blue of his eyes. Steve could breathe again.

* * *

 

**Epilogue**

PBS Presents

AN EXTENDED INTERVIEW WITH FORMER PRESIDENT JAMES B. BARNES AND STEVEN G. ROGERS   
originally broadcasted in  _ Transitions in Modern American History: The Barnes Presidency _

(This digital recording is archived at the Library of Congress.)

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
First of all, I would like to thank both of you for agreeing to this interview.

JAMES BARNES   
It’s no trouble.

STEVE ROGERS   
None at all. Thank you for giving us this opportunity.

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
It’s been a few years since either of you voluntarily returned to the scrutiny of the public eye, from what the public understands. So, first of all: how has retired life worked for the both of you?

JAMES BARNES   
[laughing] Thank you for throwing us an easy one for that first question. Well, retired life has been working out excellently for me, though I get the sense that some of the charity folks I’ve been meeting with don’t quite know what to do with me. Normally when they work with former presidents, the presidents die off or call it quits after a few years or so, you know. But I’ve gotten a couple of decades still on this green earth—at least, I hope—and they seemed only recently to realize that they can’t get rid of a Barnes that easily. Ms. Potts, especially, if she’s out there listening—I annoy her to the ends of the earth.

STEVE ROGERS   
Oh shut up. Ms. Potts loves you.

JAMES BARNES   
Now Steve, though—I don’t think you can say he’s ever retired. How many boards are you on now? Four, five?

STEVE ROGERS   
He didn’t actually forget. He talks to me about overworking all the time—he just wants me to admit it.

JAMES BARNES   
Naw, come on, an old man like me forgets.

STEVE ROGERS   
You know it’s only eight.

JAMES BARNES   
Eight boards! If I count off his titles at you I’d take up all the time for this entire interview.

STEVE ROGERS   
They’re mainly decorative positions. They’re not real work.

JAMES BARNES   
And he still goes overseas to promote Peace Corps every year or so, you know. Not to mention his watercolors—opening at the Stark Exhibit next Monday, in case our audience lives in New York.

STEVE ROGERS   
Please ask him another question.

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
Thank you, Mr. President, Mr. Rogers. This was good to hear. Now, Mr. President, I must ask you a question that cuts closer to the heart of this interview. You are able to sit with Mr. Rogers here now, but that has not always been the case, isn’t it?

JAMES BARNES   
Ah, Christine, and here I thought you were one of the nice reporters.

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
I’m afraid not, Mr. President.

[STEVE ROGERS takes JAMES BARNES’s hand]

JAMES BARNES   
No, it hasn’t, as you know—as the whole country knows.

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
The two of you met in unusual circumstances, didn’t you?

JAMES BARNES   
Did you want me to talk about my indictment? Or do you want me to start from my impeachment trial?

STEVE ROGERS   
Bucky.

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
Whichever will help our audience understand the truth.

JAMES BARNES   
The truth? The truth was... they were right. Banner, Rhodes, Ross, the lot of them. When the investigations into the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis— _ the _ Taiwan Strait Crisis—finally ended, they figured out the identity of the First Martyr. They looked into Steve’s file. They stalked him. They found out where he spent his nights. They put me on trial and asked me, “Did you sleep with this man?” And I said yes. And for placing the country’s national security in danger—for turning against the spirit of the Balanced Use of Nuclear Weapons Act, ironically—I was indicted.

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
But you were released within six months, weren’t you, Mr. President?

JAMES BARNES   
Only because they realized what a goddamn gift Steve was to this country.

STEVE ROGERS   
They uncovered files that showed that I was involved in a couple of international incidences, mostly positively. The whole Wakandian embassy mess, the Hydra Identification Panic, the Ultron Scandal with Mr. Stark—

JAMES BARNES   
Not to mention, of course, the Taiwan Strait Crisis itself, where you saved the world from nuclear war.

STEVE ROGERS   
That was more Natasha’s work than anything.

JAMES BARNES   
Well, everyone knows that one’s bullshit so I won’t even argue with you on that.

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
Those are the files popularly known as the Rogers Correspondences, is that right?

JAMES BARNES   
Yeah. Those damn emails.

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
Without them, though, the world would never have known how close America came to nuclear war once again. To go back to the Taiwan Strait Crisis, Mr. Rogers, can you describe your involvement in that incident? President Barnes, you’re welcome to elaborate, of course, but—

JAMES BARNES   
Yeah. That’s a separate issue.

STEVE ROGERS   
Thank you, Christine. Yes, it’s— I want to say again that people exaggerate the role I play in the events. Even people involved in the emails. Hydra had been planning out the events of October 24, 2024 long before Bucky ever signed the T.P.M.T. [Trans-Pacific Military Treaty]. Its origins in the U.S.’s various defensive organs are probably too obscure, and tracing way too far back, for investigators to really recover, but the F.B.I. had its suspicions pretty soon after Nick Fury took over the previous director—who had issues of his own but nearly completed his entire tenure anyway, I don’t know how. Either way—and I’m sure Natasha told you this, in her own interviews with you guys—pretty soon Fury was looking into suspicious exchanges, cash flows, et cetera among different members of Congress.

JAMES BARNES   
He reported this to me, through then-senior agent Natasha Romanoff. But I didn’t believe him. I couldn’t trust him.

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
We must mention, at this point, the psychological torture that you, Mr. President, was placed under.

JAMES BARNES   
Now you are too kind to me.

STEVE ROGERS   
Buck.

JAMES BARNES   
You know, when the whole thing was blowing up near the end of my second term, they were discussing possibilities that the election of 2020 was rigged. There were grounds for it, of course—Virginia was awfully close, you know. Michigan too. And we don’t know when Pierce was turned, exactly—maybe from the beginning. Maybe all the way back when I ran for that Assembly seat. Don’t you think it’s possible they wanted me in as a pawn all along?

STEVE ROGERS   
Bucky. This is what I know. It  _ was  _ torture. The White House made its own assessments of the President’s mental state after the whole crisis was over, okay? Under orders from Dr. Erskine and Fury. Then when the indictment came about, there were several nonpartisan psychiatrists who looked over his records and interviewed involved people, and they all testified in front of Congress that Pierce and Zola and the rest used extremely targeted methods of gaslighting, sleep deprivation, starvation to drive you out of your mind—

JAMES BARNES   
I’ve survived capture and torture in Iraq. I know what’s torture and what’s not. There was never a gun to my head.

STEVE ROGERS   
We’ve still not managed to resolve this, as you can see. In this case, though, I know I’m in the right. And that the American public agrees with me.

JAMES BARNES   
Hm.

STEVE ROGERS   
As I said, Natasha, of course, reported all of this back to Fury, who at the time began to contact Director Peggy Carter. Ex-director, by then. She had exhibited early signs of Alzheimer’s before and became frailer physically as well—

JAMES BARNES   
There’s a possibility, still, that this was due to foul play as well.

STEVE ROGERS   
Yes. [pause] Anyway, I didn’t come into the picture until mid-September, or a few weeks before the Crisis, after I confided in Peggy my concerns for Bucky. By then, the people who knew about the infiltrated government include Fury, Natasha, Peggy, but also other federal agents like Sharon Carter and a couple of political figures such as Kamala Khan. They had begun the process of segregating suspected Hydra agents in their respective branches from vital information, and at the same time tracing their way toward the top. They were distracted by leads toward Dr. Erskine for a while, then there was some infighting going on about Kamala—but as the day for signing the Trans-Pacific Treaty came about, Zola slipped up, and they found a private database of classified information he had kept. So they were able to quickly trace it to Pierce. And Natasha got the Taiwanese military involved and told me in time. I convinced Bucky. And that was that.

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
It was a very clean operation, over all.

STEVE ROGERS   
Yeah. Unexciting, really, on my end. Natasha would’ve told you all the most action-flick-worthy bits. Of course, I didn’t realize it at the time, but Natasha blew all of her covers for just this mission. With her face plastered over the tabloids like that—because she had been reporting to Bucky as Laura Matthers, before this— After the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis, she couldn’t be an undercover agent anymore.

JAMES BARNES   
So, of course, she went into politics.

STEVE ROGERS   
[laughing] I guess that’s one way of describing the FBI director’s job.

JAMES BARNES   
The buck stopped with the Defense Secretary, then. As far as we know—and we know the most important bits, I hope—the other major Hydra affiliates in D.C. include Press Secretary Sitwell, Senator Stern, and a couple of other House Representatives. It was a very deep infestation.

STEVE ROGERS   
A failed coup.

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
We should also mention that there were several documented attempts to isolate President Barnes, even before you entered the White House.

STEVE ROGERS   
Yes.

JAMES BARNES   
Yes, this is undeniable. Your people have interviewed my former campaign staffers for this project of yours? For the 2020 election. Not the 2024.

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
Yes, those who wished to talk.

JAMES BARNES   
You don’t need to tell me what they said. A couple of them—we’ve talked since then. I don’t want to say too much on this subject because it’s about time they are able to speak about their side of the story, after being stalked and blackmailed to silence all these years. You know, some blamed me for what Hydra did to their families. I don’t blame them. I wish I had the eyes to see that what was happening all around me was unusual. That to have all your political allies quit, one after the other, means there is definite foul play, something sinister. Especially after Peggy—one of the last people I knew I could trust—left too.

STEVE ROGERS   
It’s not that, though. Not just that. The 20’s were a difficult time, to say the least. America was extremely politically fragile. There were moments where people thought we weren’t going to make it—that 250 years were all we had for the American Experiment. Nothing was  _ usual _ . The younger people wouldn’t remember this, but there were in the worst parts weekly terrorist threats across the United States, homegrown extremists, people born and raised here who wanted to end it for their neighbors. But we persevered because we had good people left. We had people who were willing to stand up and say, “We will fight this flood of hate and bring back peace. Bring back our community. Bring back the kindness and respect that we should all have for our fellow citizens.” And it worked.

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
That sounded like a direct quote from Sam Wilson, prominent civil rights spokesperson.

JAMES BARNES   
That beautiful man. Does more than the two of us ever will. I’ve tried to convince him to run for President before, you know. I mean, with the number of bills he managed to get past Congress, he might as well be a Congressman itself at the very least. But he says nah. Likes where he’s at in the ACLU.

STEVE ROGERS   
Gets more done that way. [chuckles] Yes, thank you, that was exactly who I meant. The work Bucky, and Natasha, and the rest do—they’re important. They’re necessary for the survival of our political institution. But what’s the difference to you if you’re going hungry, homeless, beaten, poor, what’s the difference to you whether D.C. stands or not? That’s what Sam always liked to say. Your country has to stand up for you to be  _ your _ country.

JAMES BARNES   
There’s always a way to take back your rights, no matter who your President is.

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
That brings us to an important point, one that many Americans, I’m sure, are still wondering about. Why do you think, at the start of the 2020’s, that the government no longer served its people?

STEVE ROGERS   
Buck?

JAMES BARNES   
There are no easy answers to this. You’d probably be better off asking a political science professor about the specifics. I’ve always personally felt that income inequality was one of the main causes of all of our societal sicknesses. Everything that could be worsened did worsen because, for the rich nation that we were—and have more or less returned to be, now—we couldn’t, as Sam said, take care of our people. But for my time in office specifically, it’s a little different. There were a lot of things that people in positions of power could be getting away with at that time. America was tired, after what happened in 2017 and thereafter. So instead of the extreme distrust of institutions they had before, we reverted to extreme trust. There was no accountability.

STEVE ROGERS   
Everything Pierce did, every damage he made to the system, he did because there was no one watching. He tortured our President and no one could have the courage to admit it. That was what went wrong.

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
No one saw it coming. Not even the press.

STEVE ROGERS   
Well. There were a lot of things that the press missed at the time, intentionally or not.

JAMES BARNES   
There was.

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
Are you referring to the Florida Abduction?

STEVE ROGERS   
The Florida Hospital for Children abduction? Where Bucky was physically tortured and isolated? Yes. But also everything else over the course of the 20’s. There was so little scrutiny for where the President was coming and going. The entire build-up to the Taiwanese Strait Crisis was a direct result of the failure of the media to oversee the American governance process— Even months later, when the fights in Congress over the Wakandian peace deal were broadcasted all over  _ their _ country, there was nothing in our media but praise for America. Carefully worded praise. I— Bucky disagrees with me on this.

JAMES BARNES   
To be fair, I do tend to disagree with you on everything.

STEVE ROGERS   
[chuckling faintly] Mm.

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
Mr. President?

JAMES BARNES   
No, I’m not a fascist, though I’ve been called that on a daily basis. You can quote that in a clickbait if you want: Former President Barnes says he is, quote, not a fascist. To the point—and in defense of the media, which I know is never a popular position to take—I don’t think there was any other way. So much of my presidency was propped up by people’s faith, and I’ll be the first to say that that faith wasn’t completely based in reality. When, very early on after the election, I think it was the  _ Washington Post _ tried to publish an editorial that was highly critical of some of the people I picked for my cabinet—a very just criticism, as it turned out—there were these massive boycotts that damaged the  _ Post _ financially for at least half a year. They all say that there’s an adversarial relationship between the press and the President, but in my years, it became the press and the public. It was hard to watch, but the people didn’t want to see. Didn’t want to know. And I’m thinking this was filtered to the reporters too— Ms. Everhart, you were in the journalism business then, too, right? Tell me if what I’m saying is just plain absurd.

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
No, yes, that is accurate. I was a reporter for  _ Vanity Fair _ at the time, covering the—well, I was covering what was basically known as the Tony Stark beat.

STEVE ROGERS   
God, even then he had his own reporters assigned to him?

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
Even then.

[laughter from BARNES and ROGERS]

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
That job gave me some contact with White House reporters due to Mr. Stark’s weapons business, but it was as you said, Mr. President, there was a very—tight—sense of what could be reported and what could not be reported, not only top-down but also at the individual level, and I think a lot of us looked back at it and realized it was a mistake.

JAMES BARNES   
Well, everyone in Washington, including me and White House staffers, still took advantage of it shamelessly. Of course, my people did pay for it later, and dearly too, with the emails. The Rogers Correspondence. At the time though, it was almost necessary for certain programs to go forward. The First Martyr initiative, for one, would never have survived media scrutiny. Steve Rogers just can’t lie convincingly enough. At the other end, though, there was Hydra. While I still make the case that a presidential press pool would never have prevented the infiltration of Hydra, considering that they made their way into D.C. long before I was inaugurated, it’s true that maybe they would have been delayed. We might not have reached the brink we did with the Taiwan Strait Crisis. Some good people might’ve lived instead.

STEVE ROGERS   
You might not have had to suffer.

JAMES BARNES   
Considering how precarious everything was at the time, though, I still think things turned out for the better.

STEVE ROGERS   
I guess I can’t argue on that point.

JAMES BARNES   
How can you, when Kamala’s now running the country from the White House? Especially since you were her chief strategist and—Christine, if I may add—credited with winning her Texas, of all places.

STEVE ROGERS   
Bucky did also get Congress to pass the nuclear disarmament deal in his last year in office. I mean. Completing global nuclear disarmament with twenty other nations—and the end of the First Martyr provision too—that’s something.

JAMES BARNES   
I’d take credit for that, except I was literally in a jailhouse at the time, bars and all. And guess who was actually the one to run around the lame-duck Congress to convince the six remaining undecided senators to get the deal across? Even as he was being slaughtered left and right as the man who turned the President gay?

STEVE ROGERS   
All kidding aside. The 20’s did really bring a whole new level to political brinkmanship. Most famously, I think, the Fort Benning Takeover. This was the—fifth year? I think?—into your presidency.

JAMES BARNES   
Winter of 2025. Not long after the elections.

STEVE ROGERS   
I was there, when you were on the phone with the leaders of the insurgents—he couldn’t meet with them personally, you know, because it would give them too much legitimacy. But there were times when things really could’ve gotten either way. If we told too much truth, if a bluff had gone bad, things like that. We were facing a civil war.

JAMES BARNES   
Wouldn’t that be ironic, with my name? No, what Steve said was an exaggeration. Fort Benning, though—that was something that would’ve meant a lot of bloodshed if it weren’t handled right. There had been separatist sentiments boiling in the surface since the 45th came to office, and we’re incredibly lucky it has never amounted to anything. I mostly have, again, then-State Secretary Kamala Khan to thank for that.

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
To return now to an earlier point. The Rogers Correspondences also, of course, unwittingly gave the public a much more intimate view of your personal life that you likely would have liked.

STEVE ROGERS   
Isn’t that an understatement.

JAMES BARNES   
Nah, Steve, I think there has never been more bold a statement. The leaks only ever exposed my private conversations with you. Some of them suitable in private conversations, between two consenting individuals, but never to the public. But hey, at least there wasn’t a sex tape, am I right?

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
Mr. President, Mr. Rogers. For so many reasons, and so many years, there can be no conversation around your personal relationship because it was so political. Now, though, we at PBS realize that we  _ must _ ask these questions precisely because the foundations of your relationship are so political. And, if you don’t mind my own editorializing, it would seem a more pleasant subject too, for the both of you.

[pause, then loud laughter from BARNES]

JAMES BARNES   
Oh, Ms. Everhart, you  _ were _ trying to go easy on me before after all. Look at me, going blabbering after that about everything else.

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
It’s a well-known rule in journalism that one should never ask a source to stop talking.

STEVE ROGERS   
Especially when they’re providing valuable scoops?

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
Exactly then.

JAMES BARNES   
I— [coughs] Well. You’re right on one thing. There’s no pleasanter topic than Steve.

STEVE ROGERS   
Bucky, you’re a giant sap.

JAMES BARNES   
Shut up. Well—well, what can I say? I’m lucky to have Steve. Always. First as a member of my office, a man I can always count on for his willingness to serve, and his passion. Then as a friend who knew me. Who I trusted. Whose integrity is iron. Who can be an arrogant little shit at points, but that arrogance guides him to never do the wrong thing, does that make sense? Then, after everything, as my partner. As my closest adviser. As the greatest man I’ve ever known.

STEVE ROGERS   
You must be excluding yourself when you’re saying that.

JAMES BARNES   
Modesty only here, Steve? Or are you disagreeing with me just to disagree again?

STEVE ROGERS   
Oh, no, I’m also going to disagree with every other part of what you just said. It was never that easy.

JAMES BARNES   
[laughing] No, it never was. No matter how you slice it, I was in a position of power for most of those years.

STEVE ROGERS   
Really? Because the rest of D.C. thought I had you enthralled.

JAMES BARNES   
I’m sorry to have put you through that. And everything else.

STEVE ROGERS   
I’d choose it, over and over again.

JAMES BARNES   
That’s what you told me, when we left Taiwan.

STEVE ROGERS   
Those first few weeks back Stateside were the hardest, weren’t they? This was just after Hydra had imploded from the inside. Administrating was hell for you.

JAMES BARNES   
There were a lot of tensions pulling at the country from all directions. I think there was a point in time where we didn’t speak for a week.

STEVE ROGERS   
I don’t think we knew what to make of each other at that point. The country was falling apart and trying to fix itself into something new. I think we were too. We saw each other differently. Knew each other as different people, then. We needed time apart.

JAMES BARNES   
Natasha thought you were dangerous.

STEVE ROGERS   
She and Director Fury wanted to get rid of me right away, replace me with a new First Martyr. Bucky refused.

JAMES BARNES   
The First Martyr is the President’s conscience. And Steve had done nothing but keep me honest, all these years. That all did nothing, of course, to calm her fears. Until you proved yourself by single-handedly renegotiating the U.S.’s diplomatic relations with Wakanda.

STEVE ROGERS   
T’Challa and I still Skype, you know.

JAMES BARNES   
Have a take at that, SNL.

[laughter]

JAMES BARNES   
How did we find each other again? After Hydra fell.

STEVE ROGERS   
Well, it was weeks later. Fresh off our return from the Wakandian embassy.

JAMES BARNES   
Natasha finally stopped moving us to different places at different times. And I finally stopped letting her.

STEVE ROGERS   
We were back in D.C. I wanted to find you. Natasha told me you were in Michelle’s vegetable gardens—

JAMES BARNES   
Right between these rows of blackberries and lettuce. Extremely romantic.

STEVE ROGERS   
And I said, “I want you to know that I am in love with you. And I think you are too.”

JAMES BARNES   
And I  _ should’ve _ said, “You cocky bastard.”

STEVE ROGERS   
But what you said instead was—

JAMES BARNES   
“I am.”

STEVE ROGERS   
And I said—

JAMES BARNES   
“I want to be with you.” And I said, “I want that too.” And I asked you if you understood the risks. And all the heaps upon heaps of reasons that we shouldn’t. I listed them all out, one by one.

STEVE ROGERS   
But I did understand. And what I understood more was that we were stronger together.

JAMES BARNES   
So we were.

STEVE ROGERS   
And it’s been nothing but arguments day and night since then—isn’t that what you’re about to say?

JAMES BARNES   
Maybe. But it’s been worth it.

STEVE ROGERS   
I do love you, Buck.

JAMES BARNES   
And right back at you. Till the end of the line

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
Last question, then: what do you say to the critics out there still, who say that you basically ruled America in your second term, unbeknownst to the rest of the public, with a President Steve Rogers?

JAMES BARNES   
I say they’re all damn lucky to have had a President Steve Rogers.

CHRISTINE EVERHART   
Thank you so much for talking with us, Mr. President, Mr. Rogers.

JAMES BARNES   
Thank you too.

STEVE ROGERS   
Thank you for the opportunity. See you around.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for everyone who’s stuck around till the end. Special shoutout to anonymousclone for being so supportive from the first chapter to the last.
> 
> As usual, if you have something to say, please let me know in the comments (or through a PM). Hope y’all enjoyed the ride.

**Author's Note:**

> 1) The idea that the president must kill someone to obtain nuclear codes was suggested by Harvard professor Roger Fisher in the 1980s. I first heard about this on the RadioLab podcast episode “Buttons Not Buttons,” which you can listen to [here](http://www.radiolab.org/story/buttons-not-buttons/). They talk about it near the end of the episode, I think (I wasn’t able to find a transcript). Otherwise, you can also read the New York Times article “Social Scientists Believe Leaders Lack a Sense of War’s Reality,” [here](http://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/07/science/social-scientists-believe-leaders-lack-a-sense-of-war-s-reality.html?pagewanted=all). To quote the most pertinent part of the article,
> 
> _“So Roger Fisher, professor of law at Harvard University, offers a simple suggestion to make the stakes more real. He would put the codes needed to fire nuclear weapons in a little capsule, and implant the capsule next to the heart of a volunteer, who would carry a big butcher knife as he accompanied the President everywhere. If the President ever wanted to fire nuclear weapons, he would first have to kill, with his own hands, that human being._
> 
> _‘He has to look at someone and realize what death is - what an innocent death is. It's reality brought home,’ says Professor Fisher.”_
> 
> 2) The political decisions of the characters in this story do not necessarily reflect my own. We’re living in an age of divided politics, where bad political leanings are often equated with bad personhood, so I’d just like to add that the political leanings of these characters reflect the attitude of the highly battered America of the story, which is angry and embarrassed. This is especially the case for Bucky’s initial leanings, which are much more militant than I suspect most people nowadays are comfortable with. If I wrote a straight-up modern politics AU, I’d cast the characters’ stances a lot differently.
> 
> 3) Again, if anyone more knowledgeable about the structure of the American government and global politics would like to fact-check the story, please feel free. 
> 
> And as usual, please leave a comment to let me know what you thought about the story.


End file.
